


Nostos

by eldritcher



Series: Chorale [5]
Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: BDSM, F/M, Incest, Love, M/M, Nudism, Oysters, Pegging
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-07
Updated: 2020-07-07
Packaged: 2021-03-04 22:35:00
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 29,189
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25124002
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eldritcher/pseuds/eldritcher
Summary: Fingon heals.
Relationships: Fingon | Findekáno/Galadriel | Artanis, Fingon | Findekáno/Maedhros | Maitimo, Maedhros | Maitimo/Maglor | Makalaurë
Series: Chorale [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2022304
Comments: 22
Kudos: 15
Collections: The Song of Sunset AU





	Nostos

**Author's Note:**

> A short story gift to celebrate 10 years of [ Sunset](https://the-song-of-sunset.dreamwidth.org/417.html). Dedicated to PerkyandProud, Samtyr, and Ichor67, who were the best and kindest friends through the writing journey of Sunset from Jul 2008- Jul 2010. Every word I have written since carries a piece of you.
> 
> This is written in the style of the Sunset stories. It has a happy ending, but it is a choppy ride. We have here a meandering plot, confused protagonists, blasphemy, _incest_ , first person narration. Watch your step. 
> 
> In difficult times, as 2020 has been for most of us, I hope the stories bring you distraction and reading pleasure. 
> 
> If you are new to Tolkien, just use this bastardized [ mini family tree](https://flic.kr/p/2jiSkV9) for your reference. Only 12 names. You can do this. I've got you, comrade :)

* * *

**Act I: Kleos**

_My home is gone. My end in death will not come to me quickly_.

"Findekáno!" Maitimo hailed me.

Many heads turned to behold him as he rode through the camp towards my tent, armored and helmed.

The banners that surrounded him were bloodied and muddied. Those were the banners of Men. Betrayers, Macalaurë had told me. Uldor and his men were not to be trusted. I wondered what my cousin was playing at.

My army was weary after the long ride to the frontier. The temperature was rapidly dropping, and the skies bode no clear night. Here, at the gates of the enemy, Morgoth's spellwork pressed heavy upon the earth and the waters, and the men and horses we commanded were not impervious to the toxicity. They had been restless at every unseen ghoul's scream in the marshes and the fluttering of leaves in the windless lands. I thought of my poor sister lost to the ensorcelled forests of Nan Elmoth.

"That should cheer them up," Macalaurë muttered. He spoke the truth. The tired men were hailing my cousin, with warcries and whoops of welcome. He had done the same before the outskirts of Nan Elmoth, when we had pitched camp there to look for my sister. He had talked the men into following him into the dark belly of the cursed forests.

"Revenant! Revenant!" they called out, shouting of old sorrows wreathed in hope, and behind him the sun was setting over the Thangorodrim. Revenant, they called him, because he had returned from death, because I had carried him from his end to this half-life he clung to.

I watched him dismount gracefully from his charger. His horsemanship could be outmatched only by my sister and she would not bedazzle us with her equestrian skills again. We had not found her corpse. Perhaps the Dark Elf who had ensorcelled her had been kind, at the end, and had cremated her. 

Macalaurë had ridden alongside me, leading his brother's army. He was starkly displeased that his brother had greeted me first.

I was _King_. Marking the distinctions of rank had never been Macalaurë's forte. He scowled at his brother for this unforgivable gaffe. No doubt he would hold that against him for weeks.

"Cousin," I said, stepping forward, waiting to see what manner of greeting he wished for.

"My cousin, my King," Maitimo said brightly, standing tall among soldiers that cheered him. So it was to be showmanship then. I fretted, though I knew that it was necessary. It was necessary, and our men trusted him more than they trusted me.

Macalaurë's scowl deepened.

"Aeons ago, you cut me down from Morgoth's chains and bore me home," Maitimo continued. "You carried me over rock and ravine, you carried me past lands of foul bewitchment, past lairs of dragons and balrogs."

The men waited with bated breath, inspired by the tale of old. Even our kind, given how many of us had perished in the wars of the ages, knew the tale only through folksong. Uldor and his men watched my cousin, enthralled.

Even Macalaurë's face had softened in gratitude as he turned to look at me. The true tale was grim and dark, devoid of inspiration. We had never spoken of it.

"We would return, you promised me when I wept. We would return to cast down the Thangorodrim, to avenge our fathers, you promised me. We would return to break Morgoth, you swore to me." He turned about, and addressed the army. "The High King has kept his promise to me."

"Fingon! Fingon the Valiant!" The army shouted, carried aloft by the passion of his speech. "The High-King Fingon!"

"They are waiting for you," Macalaurë said in a low voice.

So they were. My cousin was helmed, but I could sense his gaze on me. I was no sorcerer of words. That was him. That had always been him. Crowds of gods and wisemen had thronged to his speeches in Valinor. Women and men had alike cheered for him in the throughways of Tirion.

The men had fallen silent. Uldor was watching us in prurient fascination. Minstrels sang of my love, I knew. Macalaurë flew into a rage whenever he heard one of those folksongs in his court.

I cleared my throat and wished that I had worn my helm to obscure my face. Clumsily, I spoke, "Each of us has lost kin to the Enemy. This is our chance to avenge them. I know who I will be fighting for." Maitimo stilled. He hesitated merely a moment, before he unhelmed himself, holding my gaze. The acknowledgement bolstered me. "I know who I will be fighting for," I repeated bravely.

"For the Prince! For the Prince!"

They called him the Prince. My siblings and cousins were princes and princesses all, of our grandfather's bloodline. And yet, over the aeons, lore and legend, bard and scholar, of all races and peoples, spoke of him and only of him when they used the epithet. Morgoth's beasts and Manwë's creatures knew him by the same title.

My cousin was the King that neither his father nor mine, that neither our grandfather nor I had been. The King without a crown, my father had called him, heartbroken. My cousin had worn our grandfather's crown once, only to kneel before my father in abdication, lifting the crown in offering to his uncle, prostrating himself before our court. _Dispossessed_ , some of our court had mocked him then, resenting the ships that his father had refused to send back for us, resenting the kin we had lost on the Great Ice. Macalaurë had gone to him then, in defiance of the court, and embraced him before all, as he had once done in Valinor in the court of Manwë.

\----

He followed Macalaurë and I into my tent.

"Thank you for cheering them up, cousin. Morgoth's sorcery had spooked them on the ride here," I offered, pouring him water and setting out bread for him. He had waved away the valets.

"It is my role, is it not?" Maitimo asked, wry humor lighting up his countenance.

My sword was made of alloys that Telpë had boasted was the color of Maitimo's eyes. It was a false promise. No metal buried in earth's womb or carried to us by stardust could approximate the vividness of his gaze.

Macalaurë stood hunched over my maps, making annotations, no doubt taking great pleasure in correcting my work, though I was sure that he was attentive to our conversation.

"Carnistro set up the perimeter watches," Maitimo said. "The army of the Dwarves has set up camp to the right of Uldor's people."

"I place no trust in Uldor, Maitimo."

"I agree with our cousin," Macalaurë spoke up. "Russandol, whatever possessed you to court kinslayers?"

Maitimo raised his eyebrows at the hypocrisy. Macalaurë, safely ensconced in his view of the world as he ever was, did not stand down.

Over the years, those who knew my cousin as _Maitimo_ had shrunken in numbers. Our family, those left of it, preferred to call him Russandol. Macalaurë had named him Russandol, when the bard had been a babe in his brother's arms. The name had clung to him. It suited him. I refused to call him by the name his brother had given. The name had been translated and canonized in Arda's lore. Maedhros, they called him. I clung to the name his mother had given him. _Maitimo_.

"Why have you brought them here?" Macalaurë demanded, turning away from the maps to glare at his brother. "Your judgement is faulty whenever you tread this path to Morgoth's lair. The last time you came here, under a flag of truce, believing his lies, he strung you up on the rocks as carrion for his beasts."

I would not have spoken so callously. Maitimo's face was troubled. I sighed and cut in, before Macalaurë continued his ire.

"Let it be, Macalaurë. I trust him."

"The last time I trusted him, you brought him back to us on an eagle's back."

"Macalaurë-" I began tiredly.

Macalaurë scoffed and walked out of the tent, leaving me alone with Maitimo.

"He does not mean to injure you," I offered. Macalaurë's nature was unchangeable. Neither battle nor wedding had done much to temper him.

Maitimo did not reply.

"Where is your tent pitched?" I asked, striving to change the conversation to less treacherous depths, to logistics.

"I asked them not to," he replied. A flush of embarrassment touched his face then. "I wish to stay with you tonight, if you shall permit me," he continued. His fingers were trembling as he offered his palm.

We had ended our arrangement of lust and violence long ago. I watched him warily. There was love, in my breast, and none in his. What did he want?

"We are on the eve of war, cousin. I cannot-" I cleared my throat hating how my voice quivered. "I would not prefer to engage in our activities of long ago."

Activities that had consisted of him seeking pain at my hands, so that he may forget the terrors that lived in his head. I had wanted to make love to him. He had only wanted my fist and mace. He claimed that it had helped him find his grounding. It had broken me, but if he had truly benefited I could not voice the toll to him. It had turned us against each other, and it had turned our family against us. They could not fathom why Maitimo would abnegate himself so. _Morgoth has unmanned you amply. Must you finish off what he began?"_ his brothers had shouted at him. When pressed, Maitimo had merely said that it helped him leave his mind awhile, and that the respite was worth any physical discomfort at my hands. When he had finally determined other means of coping, he had left me in the dust, with an addiction to alcohol, and neither battle nor bottle could not aid me to forget the memory of him willing beneath me.

"I cannot be that to you tonight," I told him flatly.

"No, no." He was mortified. He preferred changing the subject whenever any reference to our history arose. I worried when he found the strength, nevertheless, to meet my gaze squarely. "Findekáno, I wanted to watch over you. I-". He closed the distance between us swiftly and placed his hand on my shoulder. "Let me hold you tonight, please?"

I had asked that of him before, many a time, only to be spurned. He was ill at ease with platonic embraces in his bed.

Uldor. Maitimo's speech. _My cousin, my king_. He had not pitched his tent. He held his secrets close, but I had learned every tell of his over the ages. His eyes were dark in sorrow, in cursed knowing. He flinched when he saw realization flit across my features.

"Findekáno, please," he begged, falling to his knees, looking up at me. He had never been as vulnerable as this before me, helpless and clinging, and I remembered him kneeling before Manwë in the court of the Gods at Valinor, weeping as he spoke of the tidings of our grandfather's death and Morgoth's thievery of the Silmarilli.

 _Take courage, my heart, for you have endured worse than this,_ I wanted to tell him. "It seems that you are asking me to do to you what I have done before, cousin," I tried to tease him instead. My voice was hoarse and I felt lightheaded. Was I swaying? I would not be afraid. I refused to be afraid. "On your knees, begging; you give me a notion or two with the picture you make."

He shook his head, and I cursed when I saw that there were tears glistening in his eyes. He was struggling to hold his composure.

"Please," he asked again quietly.

I knelt and pulled him into my embrace. His murmur of gratitude was choked off by a sob. I held him as he mourned me. I should have been frightened by what he had foreseen, of my death. Instead, my heart eased as I watched him grieve.

He cared, then. He had cared enough to come to me, to clumsily ask for this night. My ways were not his ways, and he had come to me to offer me what he could. He was crying in my arms, wordless and inconsolable, and I pressed a kiss to his forehead.

"I am not afraid, Maitimo," I promised him. "I am not afraid. If you are unharmed, the rest does not matter to me, you know."

"If only I had been able to stop Morgoth in Valinor-" he began, words falling sharp into a wail he muffled in my shoulder. He was trembling in my hold, feverish and frightened, and I worried for him. He let me strip away his armor and overclothes, near insensate in his grief.

I pulled us to my pallet and laid him down. He had wanted to hold me through the night. Instead, I wound up holding him, running a hand through his hair to soothe him in vain, clasping him to my breast.

"I turned a kinslayer for you. I defied the Gods for you. I crossed the Ice for you. I walked into Angband for you. I cut you from the rocks." I bent to press a kiss to his maimed arm at where I had lopped off the limb. It was testament to his grief that he did not flinch away. "I have known what the making of my death would be ever since our grandfather died, Maitimo."

The making of my death had always been him.

"I cannot continue without you," he said, looking at me without a shred of his customary defenses in place to guard his composure or dignity. I doubted anyone except Macalaurë had seen him stripped raw to the bone as this. He was gifting me what he had only given his brother before. He was gifting me the truth of him.

On a good day, my cousin was a creature of strategy and politics. On a bad day, he was made of cursed foresight that he had thralled himself to spare our family the fate handed down to us. On good days and bad days both, he had held himself away from pity, away from being seen, by wrapping himself in masks of charisma, dissimulation, and unfailing courage.

"Macalaurë loves you. He has always loved you, stubborn and unwavering creature that he is," I told him gently, kissing him on the lips, knowing that he would not push me away that night, not when he had seen death's shadow on me. "You will continue without me, Maitimo. He will see you through it all."

I knew that I lied. I knew Maitimo. His death was on him too. It had chased his footsteps, as faithful as a shadow, over the ages, and only his will cleaved him from his fate. He would meet his death when he chose to, I knew that as well as I knew the sun's course. Macalaurë would outlive us all, and I regretted my petty grievances with him, for they seemed truly petty that night. He would live alone, a lonely wandering bard, singing his heart's blood in threnodies with none to console him, and he would not have the mercy of an ending at Morgoth's hands or Manwë's, not while his brother's protection hallowed him. Love would teach grief to fall in music from his tongue, as he lingered alone, more lamentation than man. I pitied Macalaurë.

Maitimo clung to me, beseeching, and I wished that I could offer him another way. How could I? Our fathers had been Kings. Our grandfather had been a King. Maitimo had been betrothed to the daughter of the King of Valinor. They had been unable to stave off our misfortunes, despite all the power they had commanded. What King could stand against the Gods? _My cousin, my King_ , Maitimo had declared. Perhaps the next King would be greater than I, greater than those who were crowned before me.

"I met Ereinion, when I visited Círdan before I rode here," I confessed. "They call him Gil-Galad in the Sindarin court."

"How is he?" Maitimo asked, voice hoarse from crying. "I wish I had been able to see him at least once. Círdan writes to me of him."

"You named him well."

I hesitated, not knowing how to express my gratitude. I had not known of the boy and I had not cared when I had found out. When the mother had claimed me as the boy's father, I had laughed and sent her away from my court. Maitimo had found out. Maitimo had named the boy. He had taken him under the banners of our house. It was the only occasion when he had exercised his rank. It had won him no goodwill from my cousins or from me. He had held his ground, and named the boy _his_ heir. After my death, the crown would pass to my brother, Turkáno. And after Turkáno's death, for he had no son, it would come to Maitimo's heir, to my son sired on a woman whose name I did not remember.

I had no affliction of foresight, and yet I knew, that my cousin had chosen the last King. This son of mine I had refused, that Maitimo had named and claimed, would be the last of us.

"You will see him," I continued. "Tell him that-" I shrugged. "You know my heart better than I do. Tell him the truth of it."

Seeing the boy run to me had finally quelled my spite at Maitimo's actions. If Maitimo had not acted, Ereinion would be another of my nameless bastards sired in Beleriand. There were others, I knew. How many of them had died in the womb? How many of them had died of starvation or of penury? How many of them had died in skirmishes? How many of them had been sold to Morgoth?

None of them had called me father. Ereinion had, because Maitimo had declared him the son of Fingon, the High-King.

"You should have claimed him as yours," I confessed. I had no use for pride on death's eve.

"I foreswore the right to be called a husband, and the right to be called a father long ago, when Elerrína gave her life for me." He had never been as frank in revealing his secrets as he was then.

Elerrína. Elerrína of the Sindar. They had been prisoners in the holdfast of Angband. She had gone to Sauron, to the torturer of Morgoth, and made a desperate bargain. My cousin had wept for her when I had carried him home on eagle's back. She had given herself up, soul and life's blood, to spare him. He had never spoken of her since.

"And you foreswore your crown too," I mused.

"Findekáno, you know what I have done," he said without rancor. "I would not tarnish our grandfather's crown with madness."

It was the most he had said to acknowledge what I had long suspected. He had walked into Morgoth's trap, knowing. It was not a fault of judgment or naïveté, as Macalaurë accused. If there had been naïveté in Maitimo, it had been long bleached away by the heaving blows of fate and gods.

"Were there others?" I asked him quietly, thinking of Ereinion still.

"I knew only of one other," he said, hesitant. "You would not wish to hear that tale tonight."

There was grief in his gaze. Macalaurë held that his eyes were the color of the raiment of Este. Loremasters wrote he had inherited the steel of Míriel's eyes, his grandmother's eyes. Fëanáro, his father, had been partial to mercury as the alchemical material closest to the unusual hue. Artanis... Artanis had crossed the Ice with me, and when we had arrived at the Mithrim, rains had swept across the valleys, and the sun had risen for the first time over Arda, and she had remarked that the shifting hue of rainclouds diffused by sunlight as reflected in the clear waters of the Mithrim reminded her of Maitimo's gaze. I had looked at her then, and had seen a woman.

"Maitimo-" I began, shocked as I realized the truth of the second child he knew of.

"Artanis had a child," Maitimo said bleakly. "I rid her of the babe, and buried the child in Himring, in my courtyard, and planted a rosebush. It bloomed white."

Irissë had been lost in the woods of Nan Elmoth. We had searched and searched in vain. My father had become a wraith mourning Fëanáro. Maitimo and I had drunk to the dregs of our chalice of betrayal and pain. He had found the courage to drag himself away to coping mechanisms that did not require the participation of another. I had been left a husk finding solace in drink and fucking.

"Artanis. She reminded me of you. I began to love her because I loved you," I said brokenly, too worn to castigate myself with oath or tears. What would it serve? She had run away to Thingol's court and found a husband. Celeborn of Doriath, I had heard, was a noble prince of their people. She had cut herself off from our family. I could not begrudge her that, after everything.

"I wanted. I didn't know the cruelty of it, not until I read my father's journal before I sent it to Macalaurë. I thought it was you, and I knew it was her. I did not know who I needed."

"What were you drinking?" Maitimo asked wryly, with his quintessential gallow's humor. "Whatever were you drinking to mistake a woman's form for mine?"

"I cannot be the only one," I said, laughing because how could I weep when he held me so, gathering me to him as we awaited death in dawn's wake? My heart had no place for grief. "Macalaurë saw her in your place too."

He did not reply to that. I suspected he had exhausted his reserves when it came to confiding in another. It was the most he had yielded, I was certain. Neither my father nor Macalaurë had received confidences so easily from him, despite their persistent haggling and heckling. It was a parting gift to me, I knew, and I cherished him dearly.

Macalaurë would slay me in my bed if he happened to overhear his brother parting with secrets at my bidding. He would slay me for holding his brother in my arms too, stubborn, wrathful, and jealous creature that he was.

"Can you forgive me?" I asked Maitimo softly.

"Findekáno, ever so unflinchingly bold," he murmured. "My cousin. My King."

There was no burden or condemnation in his voice. He braced himself up to look upon me. I drank in his mellow gaze and honest grin. My spirit soared. He had forgiven everything, long before I had dared to ask it of him. When I smiled back at him in relief, the grief stamped stark on his brow gentled and eased.

I clutched him close when he bent to kiss me once.

"Can you forgive me?" He asked me, hours later, when the camp began stirring at dawn's crest.

He had asked me for death on the Thangorodrim. He had asked me for pain and cruelty when I had wanted to love him. He had cast me away easily when he had found his grounding, when he had been sure of his brother's love.

He had held me through the night. He had wept for my fate that awaited. He mourned me. He had saved my son, and given him name and bloodline and crown. He had buried my child forced on Artanis, and there a rosebush bloomed white. He meant to pawn himself, over and over again, if that meant he could break both Morgoth and Manwë for what they had done to us.

"I forgive you," I promised, kissing his brow. His smile was phantom, a bleak and thin thing.

The clarions rang for battle outside. We parted and held each other's gaze. For the first time in my life, I saw that he loved me in his own way, that he deemed me worthy. For the first time in my life, I acknowledged to myself where my heart's shrine was, free of pride and spite and possessiveness. It eased me.

"Break them, Maitimo," I told him, as I readied for war, for death, for Balrog's fire.

We left my tent together. I looked up at the veiled sun, and life burned in my veins incandescent.

"Findekáno," my heart spoke then. The desolation in his voice unnerved me. I refused to falter. I refused to let him falter.

"Break them into what cannot find rest even in the Void. Leave them neither name nor memory, neither power nor soul, neither cognition nor consciousness. _Unmake them_."

* * *

**Act II:** **Mēnis**

_We will let all this be a thing of the past,_

_and for all our sorrow beat down by force the anger deeply within us._  
  


The Void, I had been taught, was a place of nonexistence of being, from which there was no return or resurrection, until the end of the world came in Ilúvatar's song. 

It was a lie. I lingered in the timeless, placeless dark, formless and yet chained, and heard my uncle's lamentations unceasing. I heard Findaráto singing, brave in death as he had been brave in life. I heard my father's weeping and Turkáno's screams. I heard Irissë's cursing. 

I heard my son calling out to me afraid. 

Did they hear me shouting their names, desperate and alone? Did they hear me croak Macalaurë's laments, for his words and mine had ever been offered to the same shrine? 

Maitimo fell into the Void with Morgoth. They had died on the same day then. I was not surprised. Faith was not well-suited to the Void, and yet I had always known that Maitimo would be Morgoth's fall even if it meant his own.

Theirs was a terrible diaphōnia of two, of Morgoth's rage and Maitimo's silence. The Void weakened to Morgoth's unbound power crashing and cascading in spirals of wrath and rage and fury. In the darkness we saw a darker thing yet; we saw Morgoth's formless malice, absorbing soul and song into its furls. And in the darkness there was a hollow in the middle that absorbed all: our lamentations and Morgoth's wrathful roars, a hollow that Morgoth guarded and hated, afraid and yet boasting of conquest. 

So it continued, unceasing. Morgoth's rage began weakening the seams of the void, and the cracks that formed were primordial, beyond Ilúvatar's song. He reached out to it to bolster his strength, unafraid, and I remembered that he was the first alchemist of the world, that he had taught my uncle. The matter without fed him, and he grew in mass and strength, and seeped into the crevices of the void, making it his own. He pressed against our voices, embattling us into silence, oozing into our formlessness and chaining us anew to him. He took especial pride in the torment of my uncle. _Love not the work of thy hands over thy blood_ , he mocked Fëanáro, and my uncle was too broken to resist despite our urgings of encouragement. 

Morgoth entered deeper into us after chaining us and we screamed voiceless, an infinite cacophony of pain. How had Maitimo withstood him as long as he had? The Sindarin people had said that he could not be sane, when he had returned. My family had been dubious of his hold on reality and sanity at times. I had never given the rumors heed. I had been foolish in my faith. How could anyone have outlasted this without breaking? I forgot my name. I forgot my family. I forgot my son. I existed as a thread of exsanguinate pain, wound about Morgoth's miasma.

The Void opened then, and I felt Manwë. I felt Mandos. I felt Oromë. I felt Vaire. I felt Este. I felt Yavanna and Aulë. The Gods! I felt the Gods!

In the cracks of them, I felt a familiar shred of resolve. _Artanis_. Galadriel, her husband had named her in pride, for her golden hair. In the Void, she was not spun of gold, but she remained spun of adamantine resolve. 

Morgoth's joy was a raucous chokehold about us.

"Welcome, brothers, sisters!" Morgoth screamed, and we understood even if he had no voice, and it was battle. 

There was no light in the Void, not even in the presence of the Gods. There was only the darkness inchoate shifting about us, in lashes and coils of long-festered grudges and vengeance, as they fought and tore each other. There was death about us, death of the deathless, the powerful ending leaving us bare and unveiled to godlike senses and sight. Morgoth laughed and Manwë roared. It was only them left, and the Goddess they had both coveted. Varda stayed still, watching them crest in hatred and clash against each other, and even she had been unable to light the stars in the Void. 

"You are weakened, brother!" Manwë exulted. He spoke true. Morgoth had been harmed by the others before he had defeated them all. His chains had fallen free from us. We heard each other's voices again. I cried when I heard my son call out to me once more. 

"This is the end, brother. You will be unmade at my hands, as Ilúvatar has willed it." 

"This is beyond the Ilúvatar," Morgoth spoke then, and the miasma of him changed as swift as the lash of a whip, from blind rage to calculated precision, from raucous vengeance to implacable calm, from a blackness darker than the Void to brilliant white. "The Ilúvatar sang of fate. I sing of destiny." 

Varda screamed. 

"What foul sorcery did you steal, brother?" Manwë's form, illumined by the white fire, was a death knell of lightning and thunder, burning all in its way. 

"Do you not recognize what I am?" The Void spoke, for the white fire was the void. 

Morgoth, in his greed had seeped into crevice and nook of the seams of the Void, into the primordial darkness outside the Ilúvatar's song to draw energy. He had become powerful, more powerful than he had been before. 

He had become the Void. And he had forgotten the hollow in him. 

"How can this be!" Manwë exclaimed. "How did you warp the Song of the Ilúvatar?" 

"Where is our brother?" Varda demanded.

She had loved Morgoth. It was the truth behind her stars. She had hung them in the skies to shine on him. Arda and Valinor had suffered for her love. 

"He wrested with my mind when he held me captive. He did not walk away unscathed. I learned every hollow of his mind, every break and fissure. There were many, Varda, because he had loved you and mourned you as you became another's. I should thank you." 

"You will destroy the souls of your family, you foolish child!" Manwë told him. "Is your vengeance worth their unmaking?" 

"The Silmarilli, Lord Manwë. One to break, one to unmake, one to make."

He had broken the power of the Gods in Valinor. He meant to unmake the Void. 

Manwë's being shifted, from wrath to contemplation. When he spoke again, there was grudging respect. The edges of him softened in awe.

"Well-met, Prince Maedhros."

Nelyafinwë, the Third of the House of Finwë, Son of Fëanáro, Grandson of Finwë and Míriel; those had been the epithets Manwë had used to refer to my cousin before. When Manwë had stooped to call him a prince before, it had been merely a mocking reminder that he would never wear the crown of our grandfather. In the Void, trapped with the souls of our family, the last of the Gods finally acknowledged their foe by name instead of by bloodline. 

"You have won, Prince Maedhros. Let me repair the Void. I shall restore your family to a life in Valinor. You may rule beside me. My crown shall be yours too. The Ilúvatar's song has been broken by your actions. We will craft a mightier song, you and I."

Manwë had not shared his crown with Varda, his consort. He had not shared his crown with his brother. It had taken this, it had taken all of this, to bring him to know an equal. 

"My grandmother was sentenced to die. My grandfather was cut down by your brother and you chose to do nothing. My father died a madman. My uncle died fighting your brother. My brothers, my cousins, their children and their children's children - we bled and mourned and died begging you for reprieve."

"And what of your fate, Prince?" Varda's words were soft. "You do not speak of it."

"Fate is a thread on a God's loom. I have little use for fate." 

"Enough!" Manwë thundered. "Accept my offer. Rule with me, Prince Maedhros. You may show us the way of destiny, and how to wed fate and will. Will you hate me to mutual destruction, to the destruction of the Void and Ilúvatar's world without? You cannot repair the fabric of the song. Your stolen power from my brother cannot leave the Void. You know this. You know what I offer."

The fire was swift in its gathering, a nebula in the darkness, a spark of bright against the primordial chaos. It did not wane or wax as it drew from the Void Morgoth had foolishly tamed. 

"I have chosen my destiny, Lord Manwë, and I have chosen yours too."

Manwë fell against him, blazing in wrath and desperation and grief. He was the mightiest of them, Manwë, God of Gods, the Lord of the Winds and of thunder, of Eagles and of lightning. He had fought the ancient dark of chaos with his brothers and sisters. He had wed his sister to consort, wrested power, taken crown and scepter in the seat of the Gods at Valinor, and he had sealed his wicked brother in the Void. 

I had prayed to him, on the Ice, by the shores of Mithrim, with unnumbered tears on the vales of Beleriand, under the shadow of the Thangorodrim.

My cousin had prayed to him before all of that. My cousin had prayed once and only once to this mighty deity. He had knelt before his throne in Valinor, begging for our family, bringing tidings of our grandfather's death and Morgoth's treachery. His prayers had been answered by curse and fate, with our uncle careening into madness, with us spilling kin blood and swearing oaths dire, with Ice and burning ships. His prayers had been answered by thralldom under sword and sorcery. 

Swift and sure was Manwë's attack, blessed by the Song as his being was. Thunder and lightning skittered in gusts along the arcs of fire, splitting its power, disjointing it. In breaking, strength. Manwë had never understood that lesson his foe had. The fire broke and broke, into uncountable sparks. Too late did Manwë see that it was everywhere, in parts. Roaring, he turned from one to many too, but he was ensnared by a net of flame. The Void disintegrated faster as it was drawn from, as the fire reconstructed into a nebula again, containing Manwë. Varda screamed, for the last of her brothers, for her consort. 

The unmaking of a God is not a silent affair. The unmaking of Manwë was sound and light and fury, indescribable, reaching past the heart of the void, breaking the final barriers of Ilúvatar's song that separated us from the primordial chaos. The retort lashed back at my cousin, but he tethered him to the broken walls, bearing against the chaos that rushed in, futile though it would be. 

"Artanis!" Maitimo called out. "Through me." 

And it was Artanis who gathered us all, pell-mell. How did she gather the formless and the unseen, I wondered? We were flung into the white fire that held back the primordial. 

I was the last, and I held the fire open for her to follow. It was fire, but it was the fire of creation. 

"Artanis!" 

She was only a soul. She careened into the fire and drunk of it, and bled at the edges of her. She crashed into Varda with her borrowed fire, resolute and fearless, and the thousand immortal stars fell from Varda's being into the void, each blazing awful like dying lamps, buying Maitimo a sliver of reprieve as their power held back the chaos.

Veiled by stardust's dying glory, cloaked from the primordial by the unmaking of the last Goddess, Artanis reached into the heart of white fire and plucked its soul. I cried in relief when she made it through as all was unmade. 

The edges of Ilúvatar's creation that the white fire had anchored to in a desperate bid to stay the inevitable folded sharp to collapse into themselves, as a sun dying. The Void became one with the primordial, returning to Chaos. 

* * *

**Act III: Nostos**

_Is he not sacred, even to the gods, the wandering man who comes in weariness?_

I woke beside a preternaturally placid lake. Artanis was beside me, unconscious. Her hair had once held the gleam of Laurelin. It was golden still, under a sunless sky, and her pulse was strong under my hand. She stirred at the touch. 

"Oh, it is you."

"Artanis." I took her hand in mine and pressed a kiss. "You killed a God."

"Two," she retorted. "I have been busy while you were squealing helpless in the Void." 

She took my hand to rise. We were naked. I tried to recollect when I had seen her naked in life. It must have been at the baths my father had built by the Mithrim over the hot springs in the earth. 

"Fetch wood. Light a fire. Find food," she barked out orders, unheedful of our state, resolute to the end and after. 

I shook my head in admiration, in respect, and dared press a kiss to her forehead. 

"What is that for?" She demanded. 

"You saved him."

She scowled. "It was only to foil his silly plan of martyrdom," she declared. She frowned, worried. "I think I may not have succeeded in preserving his intactness." She wrung her hands. Then she exhaled, and said, "Well, it is. It is. It _is_. I cannot regret what is." 

"You love him." 

"I tolerate him," she muttered, though there was good humor in her bright, blue eyes. "Foot rot." 

"Foot rot," I acknowledged, smiling at her vitriol. 

"You were not hopeless," she noted. "Thank you for seeing us through at the end."

"I would not have left without you," I said truthfully. "Without both of you."

"That is that, then." She walked to the lake and peered at it. "Off with you. Wood. Fire. Food. Need I simplify the instructions further?"

I shook my head, and left to fetch and carry for her. 

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"We should find the others," I told her, as I roasted over our open fire the skewered hares and berries I had hunted and foraged. I had made sure to taste the berries before I brought them, to ensure that they would not poison her. 

"It is safe," she said, shrugging. "The lake reminds me of his soul. He must have been splintered by Manwë's unmaking. I wonder what was left after Chaos rushed in. Of his soul, I meant." She scrunched her nose. "This is impossible to explain." 

"Perhaps that was why he refused to explain any of it while he lived, while we lived," I remarked, flicking her hand away when she reached for the tender meat on the fire. It reminded me of early days in the hunting plains of Tirion. On the rare occasions she had joined the rest of us on a hunt, she had been delightfully unaware of these simple dangers. She had burned her hand more than once in her eagerness. 

"Let it cool." 

"Your puny campfire does not intimidate me. Remember that I stuck my soul into whatever white fire our cousin made out of Morgoth's essence." She dragged her hands, oily with the juices of tender meat, through her crown of hair. "How _did_ he do that? The conjurer and his secrets." 

"It is as you say, Artanis. This little campfire is not worthy of your soul or flesh. Sit tight, cousin. I will bring you the fare when it is safe to consume."

She shut up and let me pick apart shreds of choice meat for her. 

"Celeborn hunts," she confided, her thoughts faraway. "He reminded me of you. He liked fucking, drinking, and hunting."

"You should stick to the poets, cousin," I told her bleakly, offering her berries. "No good comes of mingling with the other sort."

"I loved him for what he was," she admitted. "He loved me too, in the ways he could." 

I did not reply. I did not know what to say. I offered her food and urged her to stay at a safe distance from the fire. 

\-----------------

After the next hunt, I came back to find her playing hopscotch by herself.

"Now that you are a woman of leisure, you need a hobby," I told her, throwing the buck I had felled at her feet. "Might I suggest weaving daisy chains?"

"How did you hunt this beast without a horse and weaponry?" She asked, curious. 

Then she took a dainty step backwards, scowling at the stench of the kill. She preferred the fruits of the hunt without going through the arduous process of dressing game. She could not stand the sight or the smells. She had been our people's greatest healer. She had pieced together our cousin from bone and sinew when I had brought him back to us. Perhaps she preferred bipeds to birds and beasts.

I peeled off the buckskin with the sharp flint she had found, and washed it in the lake. 

"Clothes," I told her. "I am not letting you run amok naked and frighten my father or our uncle."

\----------------------

The next time I returned from a hunt, with hares and stoats, I heard her laughing. Smiling, I stepped into the clearing by the lake, and dropped my bounty. 

"There you are!" I exclaimed, running to embrace the man who sat crosslegged beneath the willow. His hands came to hold me. I swallowed down the choking memory of cutting off his limb. His eyes were the same, and yet softer than I had seen them in life as Ilúvatar's creation. There was no white fire left in his soul, and I did not regret that he was changed, that he was less than he had been. I staved off my loss of composure. Artanis, I saw then, was not unaffected. Her bright eyes were sheened with tears unshed. 

"This is Findekáno, our cousin," Artanis introduced me. "Findekáno, he has forgotten everything. You must be patient."

"You can tell him everything," I teased her. "It will give you something to do instead of idling your time away playing hopscotch."

"I weave daisy chains too," she noted. "I am a woman of leisure now, after all."

"Worthy pursuits."

I left them to it, after pressing a kiss to Maitimo's cheek, and returned to the game I had to dress and cook. Facing away from them, listening to their chatter, I cried quietly. 

\---------------------

When we had grown up together, Artanis had been younger than him. Later, they had Macalaurë as a spectre between them. Without those aspects, without the burden of memory he had carried once, I saw them meet as equals, Godslayers both, light of heart as they wove daisy chains and sang silly odes to my valorous hunting ways when I arrived with my day's spoils. Maitimo managed to stir Artanis out of her laziness to thatch leaves and boughs together to craft us a roof and walls. They spread stoat fur and buckskins on the ground to soften our repose. They hollowed gourds and crafted vessels. 

Maitimo accompanied me on my hunts occasionally, when Artanis wandered away to study the herbs in this strange place. The first time he snared a rabbit, he looked up at me for instruction. I remembered him teaching me to hunt, to kill, to dress game, to cook it over flint-fire.

"I did not fear taking life," he told Artanis that eve, as I roasted rabbits over our fire. 

"You became rather good at it by the end," she teased. "You and I both, cousin. Findekáno was mediocre. He died in Balrog fire and did not even manage to kill the damned beast." 

However had she explained the rudiments of our tale to him? I did not begrudge her the task. Hunting and cooking were easier to accomplish. 

"Balrogs?" He asked in awe and fear, looking at me anew. 

Gothmog had been the Lord of Balrogs, the first of Morgoth's beasts, rumored to be his son, and his fire had been sorcery that could break minds. He had killed my uncle and broken the last of his sanity. I had not feared him even so. How could I? My cousin had held me through the night, and we had forgiven each other. Gothmog's taunts could not touch me after that; all he had brought me was death. 

"No more," Artanis assured him laconically. "It is all taken care of."

" _Break them._ " I had asked my cousin that morn of my death. He had kept his promise. He had broken them and the Void with them. And he had found a way to save us. _One to break, one to unmake, one to make_. In no prophecy or dream had this been a possibility. In no loom of Vaire's make had this been woven.

Our family had never understood his strangenesses of act and thought. We had loved him and pitied him. We had taken his words as wit. _The Laws of the Gods cannot rule the passions of our hearts_ , he had often said. We had thought he spoke of the taboo, of incest and of infidelity, for the passions we knew were those of love and carnality. How were we to know that he had portended deeper passions, of wrath and vengeance and fury that had gathered strength over the ages of the world? 

_I have little use for fate spun on a God's loom_ , he had told Manwë.

He had broken the loom and the song.

I had once lusted for him. I had always loved him. Now I needed nothing of him, but his presence by my fire. 

"Home and hearth, and heart's shrine," Artanis said then, watching us both carefully. 

\-----

Tyelkormo and Irissë found us. They were horsed and robed, and were overtaken by hilarity when they saw the primal state of us, as we stood cloaked in pelts before our thatched roof. Then they leapt off their horses and came running to embrace us, unmindful of all else, and we wept in gladness.

They brought us fresh horses, and we were off. 

Irissë and Maitimo raced, and she won. He laughed, breathless from exertion, and ceded gracefully to her victory, letting her cling to him as they waited for the rest of our party to join them. 

My father waited for us in the courtyard of the fort. Long lines of men and women thronged the streets, greeting us cheerfully.

"Godslayer! Fatebreaker! Revenant!" 

Maitimo looked at Artanis quizzically. 

"I may have slain a God or two," she said brightly, giving away nothing. 

She and I had agreed to spare him the details. He had suffered and broken, again and again, in Ilúvatar's world. We were of the mind to shield him from his past, and hoped that his memories were lost to him in the vortex of unmaking when he had cast his fire to make this world from the Chaos of the end. 

I leapt off my horse and helped him dismount. He let me take his arm and lead him to my father. Once, I had come to my father's courtyard in Mithrim, carried upon an eagle, and knelt before him with a bloodied burden in offering. 

I had come to my father's courtyard again and I placed Maitimo's hand in my father's, and stepped back to join Artanis.

"Russandol, my dearest Russandol, my dearest child," my father murmured, eyes bright and full of love. 

My father had loved him more than he had loved the sons and daughter of his loins. My cousin had loved my father more than he had loved his own. Jealousy had been a failing of mine, but this was the one bond I had never found it in me to resent.

"Findekáno! Artanis!" It was Findaráto. It was overwhelming to meet my cousins and brother. 

And then, Artanis dragged me away, unrelenting, until I stood before my son. He had called out to me in the Void, when he had been alone and frightened, condemned by the curse of our failings to share in our doom.

"Galadriel!" 

"Ereinion Gil-Galad," Artanis greeted him, embracing him in genuine affection. "The last and the greatest of the High Kings of the Noldor on Middle Earth."

"You exaggerate, Galadriel," my son told Artanis, embarrassed by the praise. "You ruled with me as your mouthpiece, most of the time."

"Oh, well, I stooped to assist _all_ the six High Kings of the Noldor," she allowed. "None of them would have lasted as long as they did without a woman's intervention."

Her vanity had no end, and it was only an affectation she wore for our sake. I grinned at her in gratitude for easing this meeting of father and son. I watched her return to Findaráto's embrace and sighed in relief. She had lost husband and daughter, father and mother, in the cleaving of fate and destiny. Findaráto was her closest sibling. Knowing that she was in good care, I turned to my son.

"I could not aid you, in life or in death," I told my child, and wondered how he could look at me with forgiveness. 

"I have committed terrible acts, loathing that I had been discarded, hateful that I had been neither your choice nor my mother's," he admitted. "In every battle, in every terror I faced, I called out to you." He had called out to me in the Void.

"You were stronger than us," I told him, unwilling to listen to his acts of cruelty stirred in his breast by what we had done, by what _I_ had done. "You had been chosen, to bear your name, to bear your crown. I did not choose you. It did not matter a whit, did it? You were the last and the greatest of our High Kings." I exhaled sharply wishing that I had my father's penchant for words. "I am desperate to know my son. Please, will you allow me a final chance?"

\------ 

Ereinion spent many an evening with me, after dinner with our family, sitting beside me by the hearth of my chambers, letting me ply him with sweetmeats and cordials, patiently answering my clumsy questions, and asking of me in turn. 

Artanis would join us on occasion, if I set out sweetmeats she was fond of. My son knew her well. She had little in the way of maternal instincts, but he knew that too, and they kept their equilibrium from another life, easy in each other's company. 

"Macalaurë is not here yet," she mentioned once. 

"Larking about singing in the woods, no doubt," my son said, witty in his relaxed state. I smiled fondly at the sight. 

"He was the last of us to die," I noted. "He was not in the Void with us."

"He killed me," Artanis said, yawning. "Ran me through with his sword." Seeing the horror on my features, she added hastily, "It was not his doing. Irmo, the God of Dreams, had corrupted his mind."

They had been lovers. They had been the closest of friends through death and grief and glory. The beast that had slain me had merely been a creature of the enemy. How had Artanis walked to her death, knowing that it was at Macalaurë's hand? 

"And there, when I had slain Irmo, at world's unmaking, at sunset, his brother came to him." 

"He was the channel, then," Ereinion said thoughtfully. "I have often mused how Maedhros managed to bring the Gods into the Void, while he was a captive in its womb himself." My cousin had been a captive in the hollow of Morgoth's miasma. He had bided his time, until he used Morgoth against the other Gods.

"I suppose Macalaurë and Morgoth had something in common, after all," Artanis allowed, giggling despite the gravity of what that meant. 

I was unsettled, even if it was in the past. I had never thought that Maitimo could bring himself to pawn his beloved brother. He had used Macalaurë just as he had used Morgoth, as extensions of his will, because he had learned their minds intimately to every last nook and cranny. _"The intimacy of the torturer and the tortured surpasses that of lovers,"_ he had once said, in a rare moment of candor. 

"Come now," Artanis chided me. "Russandol spent his life in apology for that first and final demand he sought of his brother. How did you expect him to win without using everything he had at his disposal? He was fighting the Gods and the Song of the Ilúvatar, not orcs and balrogs."

Artanis had let Celeborn rip her heart into shreds, again and again, because she had known that the final betrayal would be hers. Maitimo had done the same. Macalaurë was steadier than Celeborn, and yet he had hurt Maitimo over the ages of the world too, with his stubbornness and insecurities. 

"You are the bravest of us, Artanis," I told her then, as she stole a candied mincepie right out of my son's hand. It was the truth. Maitimo's bravery was one of desperation. He had no other choice. Artanis, however, Artanis had chosen at every turn, and she had always chosen to be unflinchingly brave.

"Telpë told me that Irmo asked for me," she said reflectively. "Russandol refused. He could have ended it there by appeasing Irmo, by handing me over as our grandfather had handed over Míriel Serindë to save his son and crown. Russandol refused, and despite all that ensued, never broached a word of regret. When I married Celeborn and fled our fates, Russandol let me leave in peace. He was sustained only by Thalion's extreme measures, after Elerrína's death ended the melding of her strength to his. He should have passed the mantle to me, and I could not have refused, but he clung to life with herbs and opium, letting me choose life and love away from our family's curse, until the host of the Valar arrived to cast down Morgoth. Then he apologized to me when Ereinion took me to him at the end. He regretted that I must be burdened so. He had never wished it on me. And I did not want it, but there was nobody else."

"It could only have been you. He knew that. There was nobody else as brave and brilliant, cousin," I told her gently, and she smiled bashfully, nodding her head in acknowledgement of my statement. 

I had never asked her for forgiveness. I would not, not while she remained untroubled and in merry spirits. My need for forgiveness would not be placed higher above her happiness. If she had made her peace, and it seemed that she had indeed found her measure of grace in where we were, that sufficed.

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

We would meet in Irissë's chambers, where she would ply us with wine and venison. She had taken again to hunting with her beloved.

"You reek of horse and grass," Artanis complained, as she settled herself, head nestled on Irissë's lap and dainty feet stretched towards the fire. 

"Tyelko says that no other fragrance suits my cunt better," Irissë informed her haughtily, and laughed when Artanis scowled at the image she drew with her silly words. 

Findaráto was patiently teaching Maitimo to write with his right hand. He had, once, taught his cousin to wield quill and sword with the left hand. 

"Do I need to? I have a lovely maid who acts my scribe," Maitimo was complaining. 

Artanis was watching me, sharp-eyed. I shrugged and grinned at her. 

"Let him," I told her, laughing. "He is singlehandedly repairing our family's strange sexual histories in the eyes of our people."

He had taken to charming and fucking the women in our employ with ardor that made the rest of us blush, even as we rejoiced in the innocence and mundanity of his trysts. He wooed them with dances in the courtyards and brought them flowers. He was kind and gentle in his ways, and there was little sordidness in his carrying on. The maids spoke in hushed gossip of how he was curious and generous, of how he ensured their pleasure before his own. Given the state of his memories, drowned away in the lethe of unmaking, he found it difficult to establish lasting bonds with any of them. They remembered him as the prince that had endured. He knew of himself only as the man he was, his past lost to him, and did not know this stranger they looked for in him.

He had not been one for women. Perhaps he had been, and we had merely not known of it; perhaps that too had been one of his secrets. His sexuality had been subject to wild speculation once. In my knowledge of him, his libido had been nonexistent, weighed down as he had been by fate's burden and his dependence on the opiates of Men to cope. He had a lover in his youth in Valinor, or so went the rumors. Perhaps he had indulged in carnality then, before he had been mantled by grief. 

Our family had been notorious for our perversions. My father had taken my uncle as his lover. We had found love and lust in the beds of our kin. 

"We shall see how long his sweet trysts last once Macalaurë arrives," Irissë wagered. 

For Maitimo's sake, I hoped that Macalaurë found it in him to lay his pride and possessiveness aside.

Findaráto sung to us that night, an old lay he had once sung for us in Valinor during a hunt, and once on Arda during a hunt in Thargelion. I had heard that he had sung it in battle with Sauron, before he had fallen to the wolves. I had heard him sing the lay in the Void, crafting a mesmer for the chained.

“Across the sea, there is a land under the starlit skies,  
  
Between the shore and the high mountains a placid lake lies.  
  
‘Twas there that it all began, under the eaves of the woods,  
  
He met a woman and loved her more than his heart could.

Be at a court, or in a war, or in the face of death, or in a bower  
  
I shall not lose, nor shall I want, for in my blood is fire!  
  
Be I alone, be I in peril, be I doomed that I can sink no lower  
  
I shall not fear, nor shall I cry, for I am a child of Finwë!”

My father held my uncle, with an arm about the waist. My uncle had loved Finwë the most. His grief was a visceral thing then, as he listened to my cousin's song. I looked away. 

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Macalaurë's return to us heralded many things, some painful and some joyful, and some a mixture of joy and sorrow. Fëanáro retreated further from us, riven by guilt. Artanis's spirits were high, as she was reunited with her favourite cousin. Before they had become everything else to each other, they had been friends, and the renewal of their friendship was our fortune to behold. 

Maitimo came to me one evening, as Artanis and I played chess by the hearth.

"Slept with him, didn't you?" Artanis asked, even as she sought to sneak her way out of my checkmate. She had no head for strategy on a chessboard, which was surprising, given the diabolical mastermind she excelled at being elsewhere. 

"How did you know?" Maitimo asked her, falling into the chair that was his in my chambers, closest to the hearth. 

He liked the warmth of the fire on his back. Sometimes, he would fall asleep in that chair, and I was loathe to wake him. I would tiptoe about him to bank the fire so that sparks might not harm him. I would place a buckskin pelt over him with care. In the morning, he would profusely apologize for having inconvenienced me, not knowing that he had inadvertently given me for a night my home and hearth and heart's shrine. I ached to know that this might not occur again. His brother would not permit it.

"You have been ogling his arse for days," Artanis noted. 

I half-suspected that she was guilty of the same. Whatever the two of them saw in Macalaurë, I could not fathom. Perhaps it was for the best. 

"You are a delightful confidante," Maitimo told her, and settled beside her to help her salvage her game. She threw her legs onto his lap, demanding. He took her dainty feet into his palms and kneaded them as he examined the board for a way out from vanquishment at my hands. 

"Stop helping her. She never learns to guard her rook," I scolded him. I was entertained nevertheless. He was better at the game than she was, and yet even Telpë could beat him easily. 

"Incest is taboo, I understand," he continued, salvaging the game to stave off a loss in the next three moves. Now it would be seven moves to their loss. I had time. So had they. 

"Incest is taboo," Artanis concurred. "It does not bother you, does it?"

"No, it does not," he said truthfully. "Does it cause you revulsion or concern?" He was looking at us both, awaiting judgement warily. Our opinions mattered to him. How he had changed! I wept sometimes at this newfound sincerity of his.

"You could fornicate with the stoats for all I care. We are alive, Maitimo. Do as you please," Artanis said lazily. She looked up at me, and I saw the curiosity in her eyes as they awaited my response. 

"Stay away from the stoats," I told him. "Let us not have Macalaurë exterminate our fur sources in a spate of jealousy. Irissë is fond of her scarves." 

I had not thought to approach him with sexual intent in this place. It sufficed to love him. It was uncomfortable to wake abruptly in the night, inflamed by the thoughts of him. He remained desirable, and I desired him, but I had found my peace with the state of affairs. 

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I found Macalaurë wandering in the woods, alone, as was his wont. He changed his path to join me when he noticed. He had changed too, I realized. Once, he would have turned and walked away. There was wariness in his gaze, but the loathing and spite and reluctant gratitude he had nursed once were missing.

"He has forgotten us both," Macalaurë said bluntly. "You did not seek to draw him to your bed."

"I would not. I love him. You know this. You have always known, cousin. He forgave me before I died. _One to break, one to unmake, one to make._ There is a measure of ease in my heart I had not dared aspire to. It suffices to see him by my hearth when he chooses to seek my company. It suffices to have him ride and hunt with me when he joins me." 

Macalaurë was watching me, eyes bright in understanding. For once, we were brothers. I clasped his arm.

"He is yours, Macalaurë. He was ever yours. I was not your opponent. He cast down the Gods for you." 

"It is only carnality," Macalaurë admitted, embarrassed and yet truthful in the wake of my confession. "He does not remember the rest."

"You are his heart. He has always known his heart."

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The renewal of his relations and intimacy with Macalaurë resurfaced his memories in slivers. He came to me, troubled, one evening. 

"What have you remembered?"

"We were lovers, weren't we?" He asked softly, letting me push him into his usual chair, letting me ply him with scones and tea. 

"We had an arrangement," I told him, striving to pick my words with care. I had loved him. He had not taken me as his lover or beloved, but he had loved me too in his own manner. "You have known other lovers, but you have loved only Macalaurë in the manner you refer to."

"Do you resent my incapacity to reciprocate?" He asked, cutting to the heart of the matter, seeing through my prevarication. 

"Not anymore," I told him honestly. "You held me before I died."

"I held you after you died," he confessed. "I remember now. I fought off Gothmog before he could claim your body as a trophy. I bore you to your cairn and lit your pyre. I wept alone, standing in your ashes, until Morgoth's forces came and I had to flee in our retreat's vanguard."

My son had told me of the great songs of the Noldor that sung of how Maedhros had grieved for Fingon as only a lover would. Hearing his confession, I understood, for the first time, why history had called us lovers, even when we had not acknowledged it to each other.

The epiphany comforted me, and I knew a resurgent faith in my decisions and choices when it came to him in this brave, new world. I would be his friend, his kin. I would acknowledge that we had been lovers once, if knowing this mattered to him. 

I would love him quietly in my heart's sanctum. 

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

He barged in again. Artanis and I had been playing chess, and my son had been commenting on our antics. 

"Ereinion," he murmured, looking at my son with pained recognition. "I named you."

My son seemed at a loss for words. He had known, as had we all, that my cousin's memories were disordered and unlikely to resurface in coherence. He had let Maitimo be. Their history was a painful one even if it had ended in conciliation, my son had told me. My son had hated the man who had been his father's death. He had been powerful, and he had wounded my cousin in the ways he had power to. I wondered how they had conciled at the end. My son had never told me.

Artanis shook her head at me when I made to intervene. 

"If you had a son, you told me that he would have been named Ereinion," my son said finally, voice taut with emotion. "What do you remember?"

"You loathed me for what I had done to your father," Maitimo offered bravely. "You said that you grew up alone, unloved, because I had taken away your parents both. I begged you for forgiveness. You did not grant me. Then one day, you did. I went to my death knowing that you were the greatest of our Kings." 

There was a visceral ache in him that I recognized. I loved my son for the man he had become. I knew only the son that had become King. There had been others, and I refused to grieve. I had not known him as a boy. Maitimo had. Maitimo had held him when he had been a babe. Maitimo had beleaguered Círdan ceaselessly to ensure that no expense was spared to educate the boy, to give him every advantage of our bloodline from afar. Maitimo had sworn to take neither wife nor sire a child. He had loved our children instead. He had loved Elrond and Elros. He had loved Telpë. He had loved Turkáno's daughter and my son. He had wept over a rosebush that bloomed white. And of these children he had loved, it was Ereinion that he had claimed and named and made a King of.

"He changed our banners and heraldry after your fall, cousin," Artanis said quietly. "He turned the flames of our grandfather's golden sun to silver. Elros carried his banners to Númenor. My father-", her voice faltered, but she pressed on. "My father returned after the War of Wrath to fly the banners in Tirion. When Erenion rode to Mordor to battle Sauron, his shield was silver and his banners too. Elrond flew the banners in Imladris and Telpë in Eregion. I sailed to Valinor at the end under those banners."

They had called my cousin the Dispossessed, and he had crowned a King that had changed heraldry in fealty to him. He was staring at my son, awed, afraid, and his need was painfully palpable. He took a step closer, and reached out a shaking palm to cup Ereinion's jaw, hesitant, steeling himself to be struck away. How many times had Ereinion lashed out at him?

I looked away when Ereinion came to enfold him in strong arms, and Artanis and I turned our attention carefully to our game of chess when we heard him breaking down in my son's embrace. Ereinion held him safe and secure, and walked him out into the courtyard outside my chambers so that they could be alone. It was not grief, I knew. It was not grief, not anymore.

"Check mate," Artanis said softly, smile incandescent in the firelight as she took my King.

I thought of the rosebush in Himring. I thought of Celeborn and why she had fallen in love with him. I thought of how she had come to Maitimo at the end, willingly, to take on the mantle he left to her. Godslayer, Fatebreaker, Revenant. She had advised six High Kings. She had never worn the title of Queen. Her mother was a Queen. Her grandmother was a Queen. Her father and uncles, grandfathers and brothers and cousins had been Kings. She had married into the royal house of Doriath.

They were more similar in nature than they knew. I suspected that she willingly sought my company because of how I reminded her of the husband she had been cleaved from.

She lifted her leg into my lap, demanding. When I began kneading the narrow arches of her feet, she met my gaze, and said, "Russandol kept me company in Himring. We were an odd pair, no doubt. He was sleepless and spent his days watching Angband. I was sleepless and spent my days cursing your name. When my feet were swollen and sore from the burden in my womb, he knelt before me and kneaded the weariness away. He nursed me, hand and foot, before and during and after." Her gaze flayed me to the bone. "When I came to Uldor before the battle, I gave him Irissë's jewels that had come to me, and a lock of my hair that he coveted, and asked him to hem away Russandol's forces from yours, to leave you stranded on the battlefield. I wanted you to die." She closed her eyes and confessed, "I had avenged myself. It was not enough. It was never enough. Ereinion loved me for I was family. I hated him because he was your get."

"You do not hate him, Artanis," I told her gently. 

"I hate nobody now. It is as you often say these days. I have found my peace." She scowled at me. "Is that all you have to say, cousin?"

She had confessed great and terrible secrets. I watched her hair golden in the firelight. I heard Maitimo's laughter carried to us from the courtyard, as he conversed eagerly with Ereinion. His memories might never return in entirety. The prospect did not seem to burden him.

I continued kneading Artanis's ankles until she fell asleep in her chair by the fire. 

Seeing to her comfort, covering her with woven scarves of ermine, I banked the fire and left the chamber. 

The door I knocked on was my father's, but I knew that my uncle would be there too. 

"Findekáno?" My father asked, surprised. 

It was unlike his children to seek him out. I suspected Artanis and Maitimo had no such compunction. Maitimo, I knew well, was fond of lounging about in my father's chambers, chattering away about this and that, as they tended to the workings of the fort's administration together. They had ruled in Tirion and Mithrim together, unencumbered by pride or selfishness. They had easily returned to their partnership of yore in this brave, new world. 

Fëanáro looked up from where he had been stringing a lyre. He had taken to music again. Macalaurë was his father's son, even if he could not stand the comparison. As Macalaurë, Fëanáro was easy to read, his grief stark and his remorse unyielding. 

"Stop brooding and weeping, uncle," I told him flatly. "My father has forgiven you. The rest of us have forgiven you."

"Melkor...Morgoth told me everything!" My uncle said, voice falling into a wail. My father frowned at me. "He told me everything! Oh, what had I brought down upon us?" 

"It wasn't about you. You were an instrument of fate, nothing more, nothing less," I shouted at him. I heard voices in the corridor. My father was trying to hush me. 

"If my father had given me up instead of-" he choked on his tears. Morgoth had caught him first, in Valinor, on Arda, and in the Void. He had stopped screaming, stricken by what he had done to us in his pride and folly.

"He didn't. And if he had, it would not have ended there. You know this, uncle. You are not a fool, despite your truculence to look at the truth."

"I cannot look at you, at any of you, without seeing-"

"Fëanáro, it is over," my father soothed him. "Findekáno is right. You must let it go. You must cease reliving all of it. Is it fair to the rest of us if you linger in the places we have chosen to abandon?"

My father nodded to me when I took my leave. I hoped that my uncle saw sense. He had never been one for sense, but I hoped nevertheless, for all our sakes. I did not wish to see Artanis or Maitimo ever bend again overwhelmed by the past. If it meant that I had to lock Fëanáro in a lonely turret for the rest of our existence, until he saw sense, so be it. 

In the morning, when I sat down in the dining chamber to break my fast, Fëanáro came to sit beside me. 

"I shall strive my utmost," he promised, voice hoarse no doubt from a night of tears. "You spoke the truth. I owe every one of you more than what I have given so far. I shan't break your peace, your heart's ease."

"I want you to find your peace, uncle," I told him kindly. I had loved him once. He had never been cruel to me. He had opened his home and hearth to me in Formenos and had understood me better than my own father had. 

"I have no place here, among you," he confessed. I thought of Maitimo setting aside fate for destiny. I thought of Artanis choosing to trust me again.

"You do. You would not be here otherwise," I told my uncle. "Do you wish to come hunting? Tyelko, Irissë, and I are taking Ereinion to the far marshes. Artanis fancies swamp rabbits for supper."

We went hunting.

I was unsurprised to see the easy rapport that my uncle swiftly cultivated with Ereinion. When he chose to be himself, bright and witty and generous, my uncle was easy to love. He taught Ereinion to skin the creatures we snared and to pack them efficiently for the ride home. He helped me gather dew-stained marsh flowers for Artanis. He sang sweetly for Tyelko and Irissë as they danced on a spread of cattails and sawgrass, under the sunless white skies, with mud on their breeches and love in their eyes. 

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

At dinner, after a goblet of wine or two, I crowned Artanis with waterlilies and marigolds. She paused in her argument with Macalaurë over why she had the right to pilfer cheese from his plate. I hastily made my way to sit between Findaráto and my son.

"It suits you," my father complimented her, amused by her bafflement. 

"He fought rabbits and otters to make you a wreath of bogflowers," Irissë said, teasing. 

"I confess myself enchanted," Artanis said flatly, though there was wonder in her eyes she did not take pains to hide. She plucked a marigold from her wreath carefully and leaned across Findaráto to tuck it behind my right ear. Findaráto whistled. He knew Sindarin traditions better than I did. 

"Now I understand what Russandol saw in you, other than the fine figure you made in armor," Macalaurë said dryly, bending to press a kiss to Artanis's flushed cheek, leaving his hand on hers in bracing support. 

"He did have a notorious weakness for dashing men in armor," my father remarked. "Macalaurë, Do you remember that fine man from Doriath he carried on so with?" 

"Mablung!" Macalaurë complained lightly. "I must say that the heathen held no candle to Findekáno." His wit was sharp, but it did not harm after we had made our peace with each other. 

"Mablung was Queen Melian's lover," Findaráto said, protesting the insult. "He was the handsomest man that lived. Findekáno, cousin, you are beloved to me, but you were _mud_ beside him. Mud! Russandol had excellent taste, if I may say so myself."

"I remember him," Turkáno said thoughtfully. "Russandol, he brought you to me after you fell into a pond. You were wet and miserable from the cold, your hair was littered with water-weed, and you could not take your eyes off his muscled arms. You waved me away in haste and let him help you back to your tent."

"He was so spellstruck by the man's beauty that he fell into a pond," Irissë laughed. 

"That is quite enough," Maitimo demanded, though he was not offended at all. "I remember it in parts. He blindfolded me and led me away from our uncle's camp in Mithrim. He saved me from a snake by throwing me into a pond. Then he saved me from drowning in the pond."

"And then?" Macalaurë asked, knowing, spurred more by how Maitimo flushed, than by petty jealousy. 

"I cannot remember, but I _hope_ it might have an unsuitable tale to be told at dinner," Maitimo demurred. His eyes were on Artanis, and he smiled when she nodded at him, thankful for the salacious digression that had steered away the conversation from her. 

"You came to me with an unsuitable tale once," Fëanáro said lightly. "Most of you may not know." He looked apologetically at his brother. "I told none. Tyelko had not been born yet. Russandol came from Nienna's lands, with one of the Maiar in tow."

"I can speculate," Artanis said, excited. "It was Mithrandir, wasn't it? His expression gave him away whenever I spoke of you. Olorin, Macalaurë. It was Olorin."

"Russandol!" My father exclaimed, horrified and fascinated. Macalaurë had burst into a rare bout of mirth. Maitimo did not deny it. So those rumors that spoke of the lover he had taken in Valinor were true. 

"They lived together in Valinor, whenever he went there for errands on my father's behalf," Fëanáro told my father. We knew how frequently he had been away on errands. Macalaurë's brows were raised in surprise. 

"I did not tell Nerdanel. I did not tell anyone," Fëanáro said playfully. "I expected him to grow out of it, to leave it behind in a few weeks as an episode of puberty's passion. Instead, he went on to keep house with the wizard. Your brothers and cousins had the good sense to start wooing and courting candidates on an equal footing. You were precocious enough to chase after one of the Maiar and pick doilies together at the markets of Valinor."

"I cannot recall most of it, but I do remember we had the loveliest doilies. You did not tell me that you had known all along," Maitimo complained. 

Fëanáro laughed. "You were fond of keeping secrets. The Maiar are not capable of attachment, not in the way the other races are. They are instruments, beings of singular purpose, devoid of carnality. I did not see the harm in your carrying on with the wizard. You enjoyed his companionship." 

"I doubt Mithrandir left it behind, uncle," Artanis said, with a wistful grin. "He was fond of doilies." 

"This explains your fascination for Círdan's beard," Macalaurë said wryly. He must be in unshakeable good humor, to take this well. "You denied that you liked the mariner."

"Macalaurë speaks the truth. You were fond of Círdan," Ereinion remarked. 

"He was an ally," Maitimo protested. "We had a long friendship."

"He loved Míriel," my father remembered. "He came to our feast and spoke to me about the regard he bore her in private. I can see why he would be drawn to you." 

"I refuse to grow a beard, Russandol," Macalaurë declared. "You had best make do."

"Must I?" Maitimo teased him. 

Findaráto grinned at how their relations had finally settled into ease, without the turbulence that had come from circumstances and insecurities. 

"I suppose I could stir myself to wander the marshes and bring you a wreath of bogflowers," Macalaurë allowed. 

"I doubt you will," Artanis retorted. "Macalaurë, you cannot stir yourself even to write an ode to your beloved."

"I am not going to waste my breath to woo and court what is already mine," Macalaurë said matter-of-factly. 

This was his peace, I realized. He had spent the entirety of his life in Ilúvatar's creation doubting what he was to his brother. What had it taken to find his faith? I glanced at my uncle. He met my gaze. He knew what I meant. If _Macalaurë_ could set aside his long-held rigidity of views, my uncle certainly had it in him to change.

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ereinion accompanied me on a ride to the river. I meant to fish awhile and return for dinner. 

"Your uncle is not intimidating. I had expected him to be," my son said, as I showed him to set bait and hook. 

"Fëanáro had been single-minded in his craft. He had never been unkind to family, until he lost his sanity." I watched Ereinion reel in a tench. "From what Carnistro says, their father, at the end, had been raving insane. He burned the ships." I paused. Time and death had not leavened the brittle cold of the Great Ice from my bones. "Grief had claimed the best of him." I admitted, "Grief had claimed the best of us."

"Was Lord Maedhros mad?" Ereinion looked at me. "I could never fathom if he were."

"You and I, and the rest that knew him. I cannot say he was. If insanity dogged his footsteps, he seemed to hold his wits despite." It had required terrible coping strategies, but my cousin had not lost his sanity. To lighten the conversation, I said teasingly, "I heard you call my beloved cousin Maitimo."

"He would not have me call him Lord Maedhros. He said he did not know the man I was greeting." Ereinion shrugged. Then he asked me curiously, "Was he so-" he struggled for word. I grinned. "Was he so _unorthodox,_ even before the captivity? "

I laughed, wondering that I could make merry over old griefs. "Oh, his eccentricities have mellowed to inconsequential quirks now. He chased mating male dragonflies and brought them to court, to prove to the Valar that homosexuality was in the nature of Ilúvatar's creation."

He had won the argument with Manwë then, and that had painted a target on his back. I had thought that he had been defending my father, an inveterate homosexual who had bedded half of Tirion. He had been defending himself too, though I had not known then, for he had been carrying on with his wizard, keeping _house_. Despite what Fëanáro had said about the single-minded purposefulness of wizards as instruments of the Ilúvatar, I knew that this wizard had loved my cousin. If Melian could love and bed her woodland King, why would passion be alien to the rest of her kin? The wizard had come to Artanis's aid as she warred against Sauron, against the will of the Gods. Oh, he had loved. He had loved my cousin. I considered myself an expert on the matter, having walked into Angband for him. 

"You are thinking of him. You are thinking of how you love him," Ereinion accused warmly. 

There was nothing to refute that. It is, it is, it _is_ , as Artanis had said. I helped him pack his rod and line and catch. 

"I can understand why," my son said thoughtfully, eyes full of acceptance as he looked at me without rancor, leaving aside old grudges. "I wish I had not hated him once." 

"He does not hold it against you, and he remembers little," I offered, reluctant to broach the matter, and yet knowing that it was necessary to draw this old poison from its wound. "From all that you have told me, he seems to have held you close, even when you had hated him. He had wanted a child of his own badly, you see. You were that to him, all calculation aside."

"I had found his reserve unassailable once. His reserve fell away that night in your quarters, when I embraced him." Ereinion sighed, morose. "Nobody has cried because they were grateful to be held by me. I did not think he could cry." He looked at me. 

"You remind me of Tyelko. If you are looking to Maitimo for a classical, masculine epitome of strength and unflagging reserve, you will be disappointed, Ereinion. Tyelko certainly was."

And that had brought irreparable grief to my sister's love for Tyelko and turned him against Maitimo. I did not blame Tyelko. He had looked up to Maitimo, as a paragon of masculinity, as once I too had. I had relearned my cousin after cutting him down from the rocks, when his mask had fallen away before me. He had little recourse then. Perhaps due to the fact that I had already seen, he had never bothered to restore the facade afterwards when it had been the two of us. I wondered how he had trusted me. 

If Ereinion wanted to revere men who would not weep, he had best look to my brother or to Tyelko. The mariner who had fostered my son had been a man who had preserved his composure in all situations. I could see why Ereinion looked for that quality as indicative of strength and safety. 

"It is not that he wept, father. He did not apologise for his tears, or offer excuses," Ereinion commented. "It was novel to me, that he trusted me to see him so. I was bullied as a child by the Sindarin soldiers I grew up around. They mocked me when they saw me cry. I learned not to cry before another. Nobody dared to come to me seeking embraces of consolation. For that, they went to Elrond. They approached me for my strength. Maitimo was the first to be consoled by my touch. He trusted that I would not use his affection against him. He was not ashamed for his loss of composure, for what need had he for shame before his family? He treated me, I understand now, as he treats you, as he treats _family_."

I clapped him on the shoulder, touched by his earnestness, and led him back to where our horses roamed. 

We found Artanis on a rock by the water, clad only in her underthings, whistling to herself. Beside her were spread to dry a man's tunic and breeches. 

"Two more!" Maitimo exclaimed, breaking the surface of the brackish water that fed into the estuaries, cutting a dashing picture of nude loveliness and vigor. "Here, let me open them for you." 

She batted his hands away and parted open the first oyster herself. She dug her fingers into the soft flesh and scooped it to Maitimo's mouth. He laughed and let her feed him, protesting when she bent to nip at his nose like the petty tyrant she could be. 

"Whatever are you doing?" I asked them. 

Ereinion hung back a pace, wary of Artanis as anyone possessed of sensibility was. 

"I fancied a swim," Artanis stated. "Macalaurë refused to stir himself. He said he was too well-fucked to care. I may have expired of _ennui_ , but he demanded that Russandol see to my demands, since it was our cousin's fault that Macalaurë was in no state to aid me. After my swim, I wanted oysters."

Maitimo shook his head at her rhetoric and opened another oyster. "Ereinion, have you had oysters before?"

Ereinion looked dubious. He sighed and made his way to my cousins, yielding to the hope in Maitimo's eyes. Hard to hate, indeed. I laughed at how careful Maitimo was in sifting through his harvest for the best, how careful he was in shucking the oyster, and how careful he was in scooping the contents for Ereinion. Artanis grumbled at the partiality, but there was amusement and affection in her gaze as she watched Ereinion make faces at the odd texture and flavor. Maitimo looked woebegone. It must have been that which made Ereinion swallow down the offering. 

"You know what they say about men who cannot stand the taste of oysters," Artanis remarked. 

"Galadriel!" Ereinion complained, mortified at the insinuation. 

"Fetch me more, Russandol," she demanded imperiously. 

I rolled my eyes and stripped to my breeches. "Come out of the water, cousin. I am better at it than you are." 

Artanis laughed and made room for Russandol beside her on the rock. She did not complain overmuch when he collapsed in exhaustion, throwing a hand over his eyes as he strove to catch his breath. I fetched them oysters. After my second dive, I saw that she had dragged Russandol's head to her lap, and was untangling his hair with her customary patience. My breath caught. She had kept men at a distance, particularly when it came to offering her touch freely, despite her embraces and her occasional demands for foot massages. She had not been afraid, but she had been careful. Russandol had not thrown on his clothes yet. He must have been truly worn out by her whims.

He must have noticed my gaze, because he cleared his throat and cast about a lazy arm to find his tunic, dragging it to cover his genitals. I regretted having turned him self-conscious. There was an innocence to them, as they lazed on that rock. I looked about for Ereinion. He was attempting to set a snare for rabbits. I grinned at how he was carefully repeating the motions Fëanáro had taught him during our hunt. 

"Oysters!"

I winked at Artanis and dove back in to fetch her oysters. This time, when I opened an oyster for her, and scooped the flesh in offering, her smile was soft and lovely as she bent to eat it off my fingers. She did bite my knuckles, but that was par for the course. I tucked a strand of wet hair behind her ear. Her skin was warm, and flushed from the exertion of their swim. Maitimo made to rise from his perch on her lap.

"Stay," she demanded. There was uncertainty in her then, as she pressed him down back to repose. Ah, so that was the secret to her unusual willingness to play along. She could dare, when he was there to protect her. He had protected her the most, after all. 

"Macalaurë will never let me hear the end of this," he muttered, but he stayed where he was, grinning up at us. "He told me I would find myself here. Go on then, kiss him." 

We smelled of salt and oysters. Her mouth was tentative in its press against mine. Her hands were leaving bruises in their grip on Maitimo's shoulders, as she oscillated between fear and a desperate need to prove herself unafraid, but he did not protest. 

I stepped back. She did not meet my gaze. There was a dissociation to her that I had seen in the captives we had liberated in our campaigns, that I had seen in Maitimo a few times. He waved me off when I made to speak. I left her to him and dove for oysters again. When I resurfaced, they were laughing, and she did not shift away in reaction as I offered her an oyster.

"My terms, my time," she told me. 

"Your terms, your time," I promised her. "I doubt, however, that Macalaurë will look too kindly on us for your favored intervention of choice." She clung to her intervention of choice, despite Maitimo's long-suffering sigh as he hopped into his breeches and flung on his tunic. 

"Macalaurë lent me the use of him as long as I require it," she said. "He said I had earned it, after all the times I had supported one or both of them in their demented saga of enduring mutual obsession."

"It is love, Artanis, not enduring mutual obsession," Maitimo said charmingly. 

I could see why Macalaurë had encouraged this. Maitimo was struggling with his memories, given the unpredictability of their resurfacing. He had soothed our concerns with wit and charm, whenever he remembered, whenever he knew that he did not remember. In truth, it was wearing upon him. Artanis knew how to hold him to calm, how to explain brutal and terrible events to him. Maitimo knew how to soothe her, even when she could not realize or articulate her fears. She trusted him. Macalaurë, in his newfound generosity rising from his knowledge of what he meant to his brother, had nudged them into a partnership of healing. 

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Are you well?" I asked Maitimo, as we walked together after supper, after the others had retired to Irissë's courtyard for dancing and music. I had begged off, needing to find a moment of solitude. 

I had then happened across Maitimo. Perhaps he had wandered outside for solitude too. He had fallen in step with me, and we had walked in silence awhile. 

"You asked me that when I came to you, after I had knelt before Nolofinwë and surrendered to him my crown."

_My crown_. It had broken him to yield the crown and Kingship. I had always known that. It was the first time he had admitted it to me openly. 

"You did not need a crown, Russandol," I told him. 

It was the truth. Six High Kings there had been, and Morgoth and Manwë had seen an equal only in him. 

"Melkor and Manwë called me a prince to remind me of what I would never be," he ruminated. "Mairon was the first to call me by that title and mean no condescension. He and I knew I would wear no crown, he called me the unluckiest of all Gods' creation, and yet he did not mock me for what I would become before my leap into that chasm."

He had never referred to Morgoth or Sauron by the names they had chosen as their mantle. Perhaps that had been what had earned him Sauron's kindness.

Mairon. Sauron, the torturer. Sauron, who had taken Elerrina's life to spare my cousin. Sauron, who had let us escape Angband on an eagle's back. He had slain Findaráto in a battle of song and wolf, and Beren had escaped. He had come to Gondolin afterwards, and slain my brother. I had only hate in my heart for him, but it existed along gratitude, for he had let me escape with my cousin.

In the beginning, our court had called my cousin a prince to mock him, to remind him that he was dispossessed of bloodline and bloodright. Then thralls had come weeping to us, speaking of the tale of the prince in Sauron's keep. Morgoth's spies whom we caught confessed of how Morgoth railed day and night against the Prince who had stolen from him. Then Sindarin huntsmen and Dwarven smiths and warriors of Men had begun the lore of the White Prince of Himring. Over the years, after unnumbered tears in Beleriand, they referred to him as the Prince. 

"In the Void, when Manwë met you, he met you as an equal," I reminded him. "He had been wary of you for a very long time, perhaps from the time the rumors of how you stole from Morgoth's mind reached him. You needed neither royal firmament nor scepter nor crown nor empire, Russandol."

He laughed then, joyful, and I glanced askance at him. My paltry attempt to speak the truth of it to him had not meant to induce mirth. 

"You called me Russandol." 

So I had. 

"Do you mind?"

"No, never," he said earnestly. He clasped my hand in affection. "Call me by that name. I wish you to, if it pleases you. You were my strength when I had none, Findekáno. I loved you then, and I love you now. Macalaurë tells me that I do us a disservice by claiming otherwise. He is right, I see it now. He holds the greatest portion of my heart. He has, always. Nevertheless, know that I have loved you too." He smiled at me warmly. "I did not claim Ereinion due to a sense of familial obligation. I did so because of what you were to me." 

"Macalaurë's kindness of these days will see me undone," I said, wiping away my tears, touched by the confession he had willingly offered. 

"It suits Macalaurë," he remarked. 

"It does. It does, indeed," I concurred. "I predict that any day soon that we shall call him Macalaurë the Wise." 

"Artanis would raise a rebellion."

"Macalaurë has given me an embarrassment of riches, in the past few days, but I shall have to take her side in this rebellion should it occur." 

"Ah, matters have reached that frontier, have they now?" He teased. There was concern in his gaze. I knew that his concern was for us both. It warmed me, knowing that he cared for me as he cared for Artanis. 

"It is unbecoming, I daresay. I began to see her because I saw you in her."

"I cannot see the likeness," he said plainly. He let it be, however.

"Let us go back to our beginning now."

"Which of our beginnings?"

"Are you well?"

He laughed, reminded of how our conversation had begun that night. 

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Many months later, we convened for the inauguration of Nolofinwë's baths constructed over hot springs. In Mithrim, Atarinke and Telpë had crafted the baths under Nolofinwë's and Artanis's direction.

Fëanáro had wrought the baths for his brother this time. His craftsmanship was evident in every curl of stone leaf and smoothly bevelled dip of figurine. There was the telltale mark of his clever eye in how he had woven intricate constellations of fountains through the pools, gently coaxing the water's natural flow into his patterns of spirals and swirls. 

"Remarkable," Macalaurë professed, the highest praise he had given his father's craft in my recollections. 

He began stripping without ado. Irissë had pushed Tyelko into the water, and he had dragged her with him. Macalaurë executed an elegant dive and neatly sliced through to the surface with his characteristic precise strokes. I had forgotten the elegance of him in water. 

It reminded me of how he wielded his sword in battle. I swallowed at those memories of how he had cut through orc and man to reach my side as Gothmog loomed over us. He had come to stand beside me to face the beast. I had shouted at him, demanded him begone, asking him to return to his brother. He and I had worshipped at the same shrine. _The soul flitters out like a dream and flies away_ , he had once sung in my father's court, and I had then walked to Angband to find our heart strung on a rock. 

"Deep musings?" My father asked, joining me. 

He was watching Irissë and Tyelko lark about, no doubt plotting their marriage. Fëanáro was explaining to Telpë and my son some detail of his craft, thrilled as he ever was to discuss the works of his hands. Russandol was with Findaráto, in the little alcove they had occupied early, as they talked animatedly, their words punctuated by laughter and exclamations of delight. Artanis had badgered Turkáno to a game of chess with her in another alcove, and she was fiercely scowling at the board. If she could not win against me, what hope had she to win against my brother? He had spent his childhood at court playing against politicians. 

"I have to admit that I think her more suited to Turkáno than to you," my father remarked. Turkáno had more in common with her. They had a fondness for music and for lore. 

Lulled by wine and company, we found ourselves by the baths, playing Irissë's silly games in the light of the many lamps Fëanáro had wrought into the walls. The waters reflected the stones in ochre, reminding me of the golden sanctums of the temples the Sindarin folk built for Yavanna. My uncle could turn a mundane bathhouse into art.

"A secret that you have not told us before," Irissë demanded. 

"In my wild youth, I slept with Lord Ingwe and his son, one after the other, on the same night," my father offered. I buried my face in my hands at his shamelessness. His wild youth had not ended until he had fallen into bed with his brother. Many of our warriors had been in my bed before my father had taken them to his, and vice versa. 

"Aha! That is how you persuaded Ingwe to troth his granddaughter to my son!" Fëanáro accused. 

"Diplomacy is not for the faint-hearted, brother," my father professed, like the utter scoundrel he was. 

"I banned sixty-two minstrels from my court because they dared sing of my brother," Macalaurë shared.

We stared at him, unimpressed. His callous acts of petty cruelty when it came to his brother were known to us all. 

He scowled and turned to Artanis. "Your daughter freed me from the desolate land Manwë had trapped me in, and dragged me back to Valinor. She begged Manwë to spare me, and he did. When my voice was taken away, she spoke for me every day afterwards. She had her father's looks, but your bloody tenacity. She flirted with me endlessly, for unfathomable reasons known only to her, and drove both your father and I spare. When she sighted your sails, she called our banners, flung armor and sword at me, and readied for war."

Artanis's cheeks were shining with tears, but she smiled at him in gratitude for his tale. Macalaurë was notorious for his unwillingness to dredge up anything from his past. 

"I used to purchase gowns for Indis," Fëanáro said then, to distract us from Artanis. "My father would then gift them to her, claiming that he had chosen them. He had no head for frills and firmaments. It was our secret. I suspect Indis had known."

"I seduced Thingol during my first night in Doriath," Findaráto chimed in. He laughed at our dismay and horror at the gall of him, to walk into a kingdom that despised us and to seduce their King. "Diplomacy, as Nolofinwë said, is not for the faint-hearted!" 

"Your turn, Irissë!" I demanded. 

Irissë glanced at me, beseeching. I wondered what secret she had that she sought my forgiveness for. 

"I told Russandol to seek out Findekáno, in Mithrim," she confessed, meeting nobody's gaze, staring at her hands. 

"Irissë!" My father exclaimed. Tyelko was shocked, as was I.

"It was merely a suggestion," Russandol intervened. "What came after was of my will and make. For your part in it, I am quite grateful, Irissë." 

"I was married," Artanis said smugly, sparing Irissë from recriminations. 

"My dear, we know that," Nolofinwë reminded her. "That brawny, hunter prince of Doriath you could not take your eyes away from when he came for your brother's coronation in Nargothrond." 

"She is not speaking of Celeborn of Doriath," Russandol murmured, eyes bright in anticipation, in curiosity. "Who did you marry?"

"Theoden of Rohan, the Horselord King of the Rohirrim. I happened upon him when he was a lad, stumbling into the borders of Lorien in his meanderings, and I took him as my lover. Many years later, during the Great War of the Ring, I took him as my husband. Mithrandir married us. He died in the war. I sailed to Valinor with Celeborn." 

There was sadness on her countenance, but it was not the complicated mixture of emotions she bore when speaking of Celeborn. She had loved this horse lord of hers with simple fullness of heart and soul, without any dark secrets between them. 

"An excellent hunter and warrior, I suspect," Irissë teased her.

"You know the traits I hearken to," Artanis allowed, laughing. She cut a daring gaze at Macalaurë. 

"We are wed too, not that I knew it then," Macalaurë said quietly. He smiled and clasped his brother's palms resting fallow on his shoulders. "He spoke his vows to me during the War of Wrath. He had struck a deal with Varda. I was chiding him for his recklessness, and he spoke his vows silencing my tirade. Then he merrily walked away to leap into a chasm ere I had finished swooning at the poetry of his words." His heartbreak was leavened by the serenity on his features. How had they arrived here, in this place of gently mocking the callous griefs of their past? 

And then I realized what it meant. I looked to Artanis for confirmation. She nodded. Russandol had waited, for centuries, for millennia, until Morgoth fell, to bond to his brother. There had been a bond before, with Elerrína, but that had ended upon her death during the great wars in Beleriand. Morgoth had known of it. Morgoth had not known of the second bond, none had, because it had been wrought in the short span between Morgoth's fall and Russandol's suicide. He had not bonded then because he meant to die. He had bonded then because it was the perfect time to aid his subterfuge. His ruthlessness had seen to the victory at the end, but I found it unpalatable still. A dainty foot nudged my calf underneath the table. Artanis. She was watching me with sympathy, no doubt having arrived at the same conclusions I had. 

"You know the state of my memories," Russandol offered apologetically, as his brother finished the tale. "I do remember an older vow I had made. _Adsum_."

Macalaurë nodded, clasping his brother's hands in his and bringing them to his lips, to kiss the knuckles chastely. " _Adsum_ , you promised, when you came back to me on an eagle's back. _Adsum_ , you promised, when you walked away from me towards that chasm. _Adsum_ , whispered every lick of white flame when you carried me from where Artanis had slain the God of Dreams." 

"And what of your vows to him?" Carnistro demanded. 

"I vowed to live until he came. He would not have countenanced any other promise then." That was true. Russandol had his secrets, and had loved us and pawned us. How would he have countenanced adoration or purity of love, knowing what he meant to do to himself, and to us? As with every act of his, it had a second purpose too. He wanted his brother alive at the end, to breach the Void. _The channel,_ my son had called Macalaurë. Russandol had hallowed his brother with his fall, because he loved Macalaurë, and because it had been necessary. 

"And now?" Fëanáro asked.

"We have no need of vows anymore. We know what we are to each other," Macalaurë said firmly. 

I saw the truth of his words, as Russandol dipped to press a kiss to their joined palms. Their love had gentled into eventide, in ways I had not foreseen. One had cast aside pride and possessiveness, and the other had cast aside secrets and doomed causes. In a song not of Ilúvatar's make, they had met as equals and found each other beloved. 

"Your turn, my heart," Macalaurë offered, smiling at the flush on his brother's brow at the sincere sweetness of the endearment.

"In my castle at Himring, there was a cat that liked to hide in the chimney of our kitchens. Charming the cat to abdicate became my task. My maids harangued me every day and threatened they would let me go without my meals if I refused to clamber up the chimney to chase and scoop up the silly cat. I remember that I sang to the creature lullabies I had sung for my brothers and cousins when they had been babes. Later, many years later, I learned that the staff had been conspirators in this pantomime of ours. I do not remember the rest." 

" _Did you perchance wish to hear me sing in a chimney?_ you asked them," I offered. " _Shall I save the cat from the chimney or the chimney from the cat?_ you pondered." 

"I daresay I might have said that," he allowed, eyes bright in mirth. 

I knew the tale well. Findaráto had heard of it from his household and had returned to regale us all. The staff had replied that they merely wished to hear their master laugh. Findaráto had told me of how the answer had left Russandol stricken. 

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Artanis demanded a game of chess in the morning. Her hair was braided in an intricate manner that spoke of Macalaurë's hand. He braided his brother's hair in that manner often. When she crossed me to perch on her armchair of choice, I smelled rosin and ink, that peculiar combination which characterized the quarters our cousins kept. 

"Nightmares," she explained, yawning. "Macalaurë sang to soothe me. I dreamed of my daughter." 

I set the board for us and saw to fetching her a goblet of warmed elderflower wine. 

"Your daughter is safe."

"Bria is safe," she agreed. There was grief on her brow. "I dreamed of my daughter." 

The rosebush in Himring had bloomed white. I knelt before her and took her hands in mine. 

"It was the right decision, Artanis. The first time I saw you as a woman I wanted, I had been reminded of our cousin. I began noticing you then, and wanted you. How could I not? Perhaps I was smitten. It does not matter. I had been an alcoholic, striving to hold together a kingdom my father had no strength to rule, dealing out pain and cruelty to our cousin because that was what he had asked of me. I had dissociated from everything else, from everyone else and chased mindless distraction to keep me preoccupied. I doubt even Russandol could have weaned me away from this path. When I saw him, I was reminded of you. When I saw you, I was reminded of him. My wants were basal and crude. I would not have been able to give you anything you asked for. None of us could have protected you. You left, and that was the best decision you made."

She nodded and looked away, refusing to cry before me. I dared to press my lips to her knuckles, at a loss for words.

"I hated him." The hatred was a living thing still, in her broken voice. "You died cleanly. I did not. I _lived_ , alone, and I had to keep faith in him. I had to keep faith, blindly. I surrendered my marriage, my daughter's happiness, lives of our people, because I kept faith in him."

Russandol had asked for great sacrifices, of himself and of us. I had not thought of what it must have meant for Artanis, who had inherited his mantle, and abided for long ages of the world. Faith was no bright candle. 

“He was a madman who thought he could hoodwink the Gods with fool’s gold,” she said wanly. “And I— I was mad enough to believe him. There was nobody else. I could not set it aside and beg the Gods. I could not sail. There was nobody else. I had to trust him."

I waited in silence, listening to her confession. As poison from a wound. 

"I had nothing left, nowhere to retreat to.” She took in a deep, shuddering breath. “You were spared, cousin. I was not. Did he not care? Did he not love me enough? If he knew better, if he had loved me enough, if he had truly seen, why was I captured and tortured? Why did Saruman befoul our nephew and turn him against me? Why did Celeborn come to hate me? Why did I have to send Theoden to his death?” She was crying in earnest now. I hastily reached up and drew her to me.

"I did not see my father before I died. I saw my mother die before me, because of me. I-" She crumpled into sobs again. "I wanted to see my father." 

Russandol had held his father on his deathbed and cremated him. I had known mine until he had rode to the final battle, and then the Eagles had taken him to my brother. Both his father and mine were here, in these latter days of no god's creation. Artanis would not see her parents again. She was her father's dearest child. She had abandoned him to take up our cause. 

"Telpë raped me," she said abruptly. "Again and again, at Saruman's command. It was this that allowed him to open negotiations for an alliance with Sauron in the War of the Ring. Neither my husband nor Elrond came to me. I was saved and healed by the people of Thingol again, by Oropher's son."

What better token to seal an alliance with the Dark Lord than Galadriel's torment? Macalaurë had told me of what Saruman had done to Telpë, to turn him into a creation that was neither goblin nor Elf, moulded to Saruman's command. He had told me of the aftermath, of Artanis riding to him, stricken and insensate. Had he known the rest of the tragedy? He had taken her grief to be on behalf of what had happened to our nephew. 

"If Russandol had seen all, if he had seen even an inkling, how could he have asked this of me?" she demanded. "Why should I not loathe him now? He has his brother. He has everyone he loved." 

I ran my hands through her hair, easing the snarls and tangles out of its mass. I wished the rest of her were as easy to untangle and soothe. 

"I had wanted him to suffer at my hands, because he refused to look at what our pact had made of me," I admitted. It was a trivial tale, contrasted against what had been asked for her. "I had hated him too, on some nights, when I slept alone, addled by drink and self-recriminations. He came to me before I died, and I had never seen him as broken, not even when I had cut him from Morgoth's chains. He sought forgiveness." I hesitated before continuing gently, "His intuition and foresight, as you know well, was scant. I suspect he had little in the way of foresight, all said and done. He calculated possibilities, over multiple factors, and arranged for optimality as best as he knew. He was ruthless, not cruel."

She nodded disconsolately. "I know he had not seen," she admitted hoarsely, voice wet with tears. "It was not of his making. He had his dealings with Sauron, and I believe my safety had been assured by their pact. It was Itarille. She had Saruman captive to her sorcery. She had not forgiven our nephew for Elenwe's death on the Ice. I had her killed, before I sailed. No loose ends. Russandol would be proud, if only he remembered."

"He is proud of you, for what he remembers," I promised her, as she confessed kinslaying. Itarillë had been a child on my lap, to whom I had read bedtime stories and sung lullabies for. I repressed my grief. There would be time to grieve my niece later. "I remember, Artanis. I am proud of you. As is Macalaurë."

"I have slept alone for most of my life," she said quietly then, picking at loose threads on her sleeves. I cursed Celeborn for having done that to her, for having left her marriage bed. 

I had slept alone too, but for the occasional night when Russandol had been too tired to rouse himself after our engagements. Those had been nights of grace, when I had held my unwitting heart close. And he had come to me, beseeching, on the eve of my death. 

"My bed is yours," I told her, artless. "I do not know what manner of bedfellow I make, I must warn you."

She said nothing to that, but in my hands her fingers trembled.

\---------------------------------

I rushed to Macalaurë. I found him in the baths, alone for his morning's swim. I waited for him to complete his exertions and join me.

"Cousin," he greeted me without rancor, in his newfound resolve to be a benevolent man. 

"I came to speak to you," I said. "I know I shall make a hash of matters with Artanis. What must I do?"

He looked amused by my conundrum despite himself. I knew it was not pleasure in my misery. He had left all that behind him. 

"You know that I set a poor precedent," he admitted. "I have no counsel to offer." He sighed. "Russandol is optimistic. I daresay that counts for something." 

"I hope he is not lacking diversions and choosing to while away his time amusing himself in matchmaking."

"He has little inclination towards such pursuits. Find your sister. Take her to the market and have her help you select a gown for Artanis." He hesitated. "Her father used to buy her bedazzling gowns of silk and ermine. After she crossed the Ice and left him behind, there were no gifts of finery in her life. I do not think it occurred to any of us that she might prefer gifts instead of gold, practical and unimaginative creatures that we were." 

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Irissë did not give me a moment's respite from questions. She dragged me from one merchant to the next, inspecting fabric and weave and heft with the eye of a connoisseur. 

"You steal my breeches to go larking about the wilderness with Tyelko." 

"I used to select gowns for Turkáno's daughter," she said absently, holding a gauzy thing to the light and eyeing it critically. 

I wondered how outdated her selections might be. I had nobody else to ask. Russandol was one for fine haberdashery, with his cloaks of hand-spun silk. His robes draped about his form with obscene precision. He had given up neither his pearl-buttoned tunics nor his lambskin breeches. As dandyish as any of Ingwe's people, my father had been fond of teasing him in Valinor. Russandol had clung to blacks, whites, and the occasional muted grey when I had brought him back from Angband, but even then, his clothes had been of the finest make, of fabrics he sourced from all about the known world to his cold fortress in Himring. The rest of us had paid little care to our clothing, but for the rare occasions when my father had insisted that we come attired in pomp and splendor to impress emissaries. Our robes and Irissë's gowns were cut from the same cloth, as they had always been, practical creatures that we were. Artanis, though once fond of white, had also lapsed into our ways. 

"She will never wear that," I told Irissë, who was holding up a gaudy, blue creation. 

I might as well as have brought Russandol along. He had a fine eye for aesthetics. While I doubted that he knew anything about what might suit a woman, he would at least not have chosen something that was clearly designed to display breasts in offering to the viewer. 

"She has lovely breasts," Irissë said, laughing when I cuffed her head. "Oh well! I have chosen." She dragged me back to the first merchant we had visited. He grinned at her and offered a neatly wrapped parcel. I hoped that it was nothing Artanis might be offended by. I had to trust my sister, that her heart was in the right place even if her sense was questionable. 

"You abominable beast! We could have returned four hours ago."

"I wanted to spend the day with you, brother."

That unbent me from my dudgeon. I took her to the sweetmeats shops and to the hunting warehouses. She cried when I bought her new boots for hers had turned cracked and ugly from use. 

"Shall we buy you breeches?" I offered. "You needn't make do with my castoffs."

"I like making do," she said firmly, embracing me. "It is not that I cannot have breeches made. You allow me to steal yours." 

"Who am I to deny your thieving pleasures?"

"I was skulking about in the stables to steal your saddle a week ago. I chanced upon Macalaurë in one of the stalls, bridled with a bit, and Russandol on his knees sucking the haughtiness out of him." She shivered. "It was a sight."

I grinned at her affectations and flicked her scrunched nose, as we walked back home hand in hand. 

These were days of no god's make. I decided to entertain my sister with salacious gossip.

"When he came to me the first time, no doubt spurred by your suggestion, he found me watching our father break in a stallion. I remember that once he spent hours explaining the intricacies of animal husbandry to me, and all I had to blurt was that he was finer than any stallion bred. Fortunately, he was desperate for company and overlooked my witless ways. Perhaps I imprinted on him." 

After that dismal attempt at a compliment, he had offered me a saddle and a whip, and he had never looked lovelier than when he had yielded that night. I remembered that he had wound up dislocating his shoulder in the enthusiasm of our games. He had not complained about it. I had been terrified. _I maimed you once. I have no wish to maim you again_ , I had said. He had found the humor in our state, then. I knew that it was his ability to find self-effacing humor in grief that had let him preserve his sanity. I had laughed with him, for what else could I have done. He had let me make love to him then, in recompense for having alarmed me. I remembered how, in passion, his head had been thrown back, finer than any of my father's prize stallions. He had smiled, embarrassed, at my praise.

I must have imprinted on him, after all, if he carried about in stables these days. It was certainly not Macalaurë's way. 

"Whatever you say, do not call Artanis a mare," my sister advised, giggling at the fruits of her silly imagination. 

"Tyelko calls you a dog in heat," I reminded her. They were not married yet, despite my father's pleas that they ought to cease living in sin. I suspected that my father wanted badly to host a grand marriage. 

"Well, Tyelko and I are not Artanis. She is a woman of great sophistication, brother. Pearls to swine, as our father is fond of saying." 

"Did you call me swine?"

She laughed and ran away from my wrath. I chased her home.

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Artanis came to dinner that night wearing the gown Irissë had chosen. My breath caught in my throat, and I forgot the thread of conversation I had been engaged in with Findaráto. Irissë winked at me. 

"You look lovely, cousin," Macalaurë greeted her, when she sat beside him. 

The gown was the blue and green of our brackish river, where she liked to send us diving for oysters. It was a peplos of loose woven cambric, girdled, held up by brooches of pearl. About her elbows, she had draped the first coat of stoat I had flayed and pelted for her when she and I had arrived by the lake, in this song not of Ilúvatar's make. 

My father had arranged for a puppetry show that night to entertain us. He fancied himself a patron of the arts in our latter days.

The puppeteers crafted for us an embellished tale of our family's saga.

Macalaurë tutted when my puppet kissed my cousin's, while Morgoth's puppet screamed in rage. My father's puppet came then, sword aloft, and cut off Morgoth's legs. 

"You had barely scratched his littlest of toes," Artanis complained. 

"Artistic liberties," my father explained, cheered by this valorous portrayal of him.

It was flattering. Turkáno's puppet skewered Sauron and many balrogs in Gondolin. In the dark forest of Nan Elmoth, my sister's puppet slew many beasts. 

"Where am I?" Artanis demanded querulously.

"Hush!" Turkáno scolded her, enamored by how Russandol's puppet was charging a dragon that turned tail in cowardice. Glaurung. He had dared the wrath of the dragon to save his brother. The dragon, understandably, had wanted no battles with madmen, and had absconded to find saner prey. 

Artanis's puppet came along, dancing and singing, and swooned in Celeborn's arms. 

"I _married_? That is what our lore writes of me?" She muttered in high dudgeon. "The rest of you built kingdoms, staged valorous campaigns against the enemy, and slew beasts. I married." 

"Every story needs a princess," I teased her. 

The story continued, and my puppet burned in a balrog's sorcerous fire. Russandol's puppet ambled about, drunken, wailing in woe. 

"He did not grieve you as a drunkard," Macalaurë informed me, before I could begin to remark on the tragedy. "I had sex with him that night instead, and the tent pegs gave away, burying us both in fabric and wood beams." Petty bastard. My pyre must not even have turned cold.

"Where am I?" Artanis demanded. 

"There, there, nobody sings of a married woman's mundanity in mighty sagas," Irissë told her sweetly. 

I had not lived to see the rest of it, but I had heard the tales. My heart clenched as Russandol's puppet stole his father's jewel from the battle camp of the Gods, and leapt with it into a chasm. Macalaurë's puppet began wailing. 

"And I had dared hope they had forgotten of my existence," he remarked.

A familiar and ditzy marionette came back, and danced with her husband again, as the tale ended.

"Every story needs a princess who lives happily ever after," Irissë said, giggling. It was merely good breeding that stayed Artanis's hand then.She glared at the puppeteers as Nolofinwë went to greet them and reward them for their craft and theatre.

"They wish to meet you, Russandol," my father called, bringing the puppeteers to us. 

"Godslayer, fate breaker, revenant," the hero-struck puppeteers heralded him. 

Russandol rose to greet them, courteous in his words and gestures as he praised their work. He pointed Artanis out to them, but they had eyes only for him. He decided that retreat was the better part of valor, and ushered them out graciously.

"I suppose there shall be no better occasion," Fëanáro said, rising to his feet. He walked to Irissë first, bent to press a kiss to her cheek, and draped a circlet of polished obsidian about her neck. She exclaimed in delight, and stood to embrace him. "I could not repair your knife. I decided to repurpose it." My father raised his eyebrows. There was no knife Fëanáro could not repair. He had chosen to recast it into jewelry. 

"And for you, Artanis." He sighed, nervous. Her necklace was wrought of a gem I had never seen before, paler than the moon, its colorless brightness veined by blue, and when it caught the light of our torches, it was as resplendent as the woman it adorned. Our uncle had wrought it as a circle unclosed, delicate in its wrap about her neck. 

"Whatever is it?" My father queried, suspicious. "Fëanáro, the last time you wrought something as magnificent, it was wrought of your soul." 

The Silmarilli. We did not speak of them. 

"This has nothing to do with my soul, brother," Fëanáro hastily reassured him. "It is made of matter more powerful. It is made of mud I purified through alchemy, after sedimentation, filtration and substration."

"The lake!" Turkáno exclaimed. "Uncle, that is worse than _your_ soul. We have little knowledge of what the manner of its making was."

I had been the last to leave the Void before it had collapsed into Chaos, with precious time that Artanis had bought us by destroying the thousand immortal stars.

Fëanáro had unearthed the mystery. I should not have been surprised. His brilliance was unparalleled, as was his folly. They called him a smith. He was an alchemist. No smith could worked stone from soul and soul from stone. And no gift more apropos than this, to Artanis.

"I know the manner of its making," I told her. "As do you."

She shook her head in incomprehension of my meaning. Her greatest blind spot had ever been herself. I suppressed a smile. 

"After you saved our souls, as Chaos began consuming the Void, do you remember what you did?"

She exhaled sharply. "I pierced our cousin's veil of white and plucked the core of him." 

"When you say it in that manner," Findaráto said, laughing. Artanis scowled at him. "Russandol, whatever did she do to you?"

"I wish I could remember such delights at her hands," Russandol said, amused and in blissful oblivion of what had happened. 

"He shielded you from the disintegration of the Void to his utmost, but he had begun unspooling into the vortex of Chaos. His edges were porous and you had reached into him. You were connected when you breached the song of Ilúvatar together," I told her. "The song of this creation was of his weave, but it was speckled by your desires. Why do you think we have oysters in our rivers?" 

Artanis sat down in her chair, struck by the truth of what I had spoken. My family listened to me, enraptured by my retelling. They had not seen the end. I had been there, and I had put together the puzzle that neither Artanis nor Russandol had. Fëanáro beamed at me proudly. I grinned at him, basking in his admiration.

The oysters. The oysters had confirmed my suspicions. 

Artanis had been fond of them. Her mother's father had sent fishermen every day to fetch her fresh oysters and clams. Everything else in this creation bore Russandol's mark. He had loved the plains of Formenos, the woodlands of the outback of Tirion, and the marshes of Nienna's lands. He had little fondness for climes cold or snowy. He had his preferences, but oysters had never been among them. Oysters that I had seen only in saline ocean waters were in the rivers of this creation, influenced by Artanis's desires. 

"Unspooling, shapeless miasmas? You paint them as organisms not unlike an amoeba," Macalaurë said then, practical, devoid of imagination. How would we explain any of it to him? His brother had spared him the Void. 

"It is a tale fantastical and ghastly," Russandol concurred, lethe aiding his good humor. "What does it matter now? Father, regardless of what constituted the material, you have given it form and function. And how it becomes Artanis!"

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I returned from my postprandial nocturnal ambling to find Artanis in my bed, underneath my buckskin pelts. She had banked the fire. She wore the gown I had given her. About her neck was the gleam of the jewel our uncle had wrought for her. He had given it to her at the most opportune of time, when she had been sulking that none saw her bravery and brilliance. I bent to touch the adornment. It was strangely cool to the touch, and it warmed under my skin slowly. In the darkness, the veins of blue sparkled bright against white gloaming. 

"My father will have my head for this, but I must say that our uncle is more suited to soul and stone than to metallurgy."

"He does make a chain of souls look attractive," she allowed, breathless, when I shifted my fingers to her collar, thumbing gently along her clavicle. 

"Why do you think he gave it to me?" She wondered, tilting her head to allow me to drag my fingers to her shoulder. "It was Russandol's victory."

"Is it the bow or the arrow that kills the buck?" I asked her. 

"Does it matter? The buck is dead." 

"Indeed." 

She laughed at the silly comparison and reached to cup my face. "I want to see you." 

"Strip me, then," I told her, opening my palms in offering. "We will do what you wish."

"Are you fond of the games of sadism and masochism you played with him?" She asked softly. "I want none of it."

"We will do what you wish, Artanis." 

She nodded, unsure, and knelt up on the bed so that she might remove my tunic. It snagged in my hair, and she laughed, leaving me blinded by fabric, her fingers coming to my chest warm and curious. I let her touch, her hands first skittish and then sure when she understood that I would not move until she asked it of me. She dragged away the tunic and looked at me, eyes blazing in hope. 

"Turn around."

I obeyed her. She pressed herself against my back. The coarse weave of the cambric she wove scraped over my skin, streaking pleasure. Her skin's heat touched mine, despite the fabric between us. Her arms came about me, holding me to her. I wanted to take her hands in mine, but I waited. She came to nose at my hair, and pressed her lips to the nape of my neck. 

"You held me on the great Ice," she said softly, dragging her lips down the line of my spine. "In the distance, the ships burned. I had blood on my hands I could not wash away. We lost Elenwë that day. You held me, and I remember your scent grounded me. You had held me astride your horse on hunts before. You had held me when we danced in gaiety in the court of Tirion. You had held me before Manwë, when Russandol came with tidings of our grandfather's death. After we crossed the Ice, you stank of drink and whores." 

Russandol had pressed his lips thin in disapproval whenever I had gone to him smelling of whores and alcohol. I had struck him for his gall to judge me. 

"The spies in Doriath said that you preferred men," she said, apropos of nothing, her hands dipping to my navel, and then to the buckles of my breeches.

"There were no women after you."

There had been no women after her. There had been no men after him. 

I felt her tears on my skin. "I wish you had not harmed me," she said fiercely. 

"Artanis, you needn't, not if this will bring you any measure of pain," I turned to face her. She shook her head, obstinate. 

"I wish to love you," I told her frankly. "I shan't let us proceed if you will use this to turn us to recriminations and sorrow." She had had her vengeance. Our crimes were not equal, but there was no penance I could offer her. 

"I want you to love me. I want you to forget him," she blurted, and then cursed, her shoulders trembling at the admission she had made. 

"Oh, you and I know he is as footrot, contagious and hard to shake off," I teased her, and found myself heartened when she grinned at our old family jibe.

I bore her down to the ermine furs of my bedding. Her hands came to my buckles again, and unfastened them without clumsiness. I bit back a smile at her familiarity with men's articles and accoutrements. It had to be the horse lord. Celeborn was a man of tradition, unlikely to allow his wife sway in their bed. And Macalaurë rode in his robes. He hated belt and girdle, buckle and lace. Breeches, he held, were for the uncivilized heathen man. 

"The horselord taught you a thing or two, didn't he?" 

"I shan't tell," she said, blushing, and turned us about, straddling me, watching me keenly in the dim light of the embers of my hearth. "You are a vision," she muttered, and her lust was a living, breathing creature of intent as she brought her mouth to mine, for a kiss of tongue and teeth, bold and wanting. We were out of practice, but she was swiftly relearning the rhythms of old dances, guiding me along on the tide of her ardor. 

"You are not very good at this," she mocked me gently. 

"I was not sober for any of my engagements," I told her. 

"I am surprised any of them came back to you."

"Only one did," I informed her. "I doubt he had a choice. There was a dearth of cousins he could prevail upon to peddle him perversion." 

"I peddled him opiates," she said, laughing, skimming her fingers along my flanks erratic. "We have more in common than you knew, Findekáno." I clasped her by the back of her neck and tugged her into a kiss. She gasped and yielded, lovely in her need. 

"Take off your gown, before I stain it." 

"No."

I rolled my eyes at her contrariness. She whispered my name in shock when I lifted her by the hips and sat her on my face, her skirts in disarray and my mouth warm and wet on her through the thin cotton of her underthings. 

She was close, her breath stuttering and her words falling away half-spoken. She let me suck at her there, where she was wet with honest desire for me, her lips parting under mine, her flesh warm and soft, her scent raw and metallic overwhelming. I ached to see her, but it did not matter, not then, when her thighs held me captive, when her voice was a wail, when she fell upon me graceless and unravelled. 

I tugged her down, so that I held her to my breast, my hands running idle through her tangled hair. 

"You haven't done that before, have you?" She asked, breathless and ecstatic, exultant that she had had a first of me. When she kissed me, she groaned at the pungent taste of her in my mouth. 

"You are hard," she murmured, rubbing the length of her svelte form against me. "You are staining my gown."

"Take it off, then," I asked her. She shook her head, contrary to the end. She came to wrap cambric about my cock, watching me flinch at the coarseness against the sensitive skin. It hurt but my yearning was deeper, for her deft fingers through fabric against me, tugging me, learning what every gasp and groan of mine meant, drawing her name from my throat again and again, until she had me spend, staining flesh and cloth.

"You are crying," she said aghast, when she woke to me in the morning, her hair tussled wild and her eyelashes clumped from sleep. 

"Good morning, Artanis." I kissed her brow and let her rub away the joy on my cheeks. 

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"Make way! Make way for the prince! Godslayer, Fatebreaker, Revenant." 

"Nostalgic trivia, my friend. From today, I hope I am fortunate to only hear my name on your sweet lips when you announce me," Russandol told the stablehand, his charm eking a blush from the boy. 

I had sent for him to inspect the damage to our horses. Perhaps all his years of animal husbandry had some merit to them. 

"Foot rot," Fëanáro said sadly. "We must put the beasts out of misery lest they infect the others." 

"Let me see," Russandol said, calm while we watched in woe the two infected beasts. The foul stench was overpowering. Tyelko's and Irissë's. What manner of infested bog had they taken the horses to? My father had had the sense to separate the rest of our stables as soon as Irissë had come to him, frightened. 

Russandol squatted beside Irissë's mount, by its hindlegs, uncaring of the muck he dragged his spunsilk tunic through. I had to suppress a fond smile at the characteristic economy of his graceful movements. Unbidden, Findaráto went to steady the beast. He had been the only one who had taken the least of interest in Russandol's pursuits of animal husbandry. 

"Here," Macalaurë said, unearthing a bit from the pocket of his robes and throwing it to Findaráto to quell the beast's shrieks. 

"I shan't ask why you have a bit in your possession," Turkáno muttered, amused despite himself. "You ride bareback without bit, blinders, and bridle."

Macalaurë did not deign to take the bait, his eyes careful as he watched Russandol gently scrape off keratin along the hoof. The beast reared, but Findaráto eased it with word and song. 

"I brought the mould," Artanis said. 

"Stay clear of her reach, cousin," Russandol murmured. "She is in great pain and will not hold still." 

"You are the one under her belly," Macalaurë noted. His gaze and mine were fixed, calculating, on the easiest recourse to drag Russandol away should Findaráto fail to hold the beast. 

"I have done this before."

"Do you remember?" 

"Not well," Russandol admitted, careful as he made incisions to draw out the festering from the swollen, tender skin. The mare whinnied, frightened and pained, and soiled itself. He continued, unperturbed, precise as he wielded the knife as a scalpel. Artanis passed him the mould and he sealed the drained wounds. The mare steadied, intelligent thing that it was, realizing that he meant to alleviate her suffering. He crawled over to her forelegs, to begin the procedure anew.

I marveled at Findaráto's capacity to speak soft to the beast in the Sindarin tongue. He must have learned this horse whispering in Doriath. I looked to Artanis. She had wedded that prince. What horse whispering had she learnt?

"I can make all beasts and birds do my bidding," she told me boldly, mischief bright in her smile. I rolled my eyes at the innuendo in her voice. 

"Can we trade places?" Findaráto asked Russandol. "I wish to learn." 

"Of course!" Russandol exclaimed, excited to have another interested in his silly pursuits. He grabbed our cousin by the sleeve to tug him down. I foresaw many adventures in animal husbandry for the pair of them. My father did not hide his exasperation as Russandol taught Findaráto.

"Never along the seams of where the skin has cracked," he was saying, holding steady Findaráto's hand in his. "Mark where the keratin is the thinnest." 

I had often envied their easy camaraderie in the past. Of us all, Findaráto was like in temperament to Russandol. They had shared interests, and a fondness for wordplay and debates that death had not cured them of. Their rapport had irked both Macalaurë and I once.

They went on to treat Tyelko's stallion together. 

"You may try," Russandol encouraged his apprentice. "Go on," he reassured, when Findaráto fretted. "I am here."

Findaráto stilled at the words, overwhelmed, before nodding valiantly and stepping forward. He saw, as I saw, that Russandol had not remembered. Russandol's voice took on a mellow, tutoring cadence that I knew well, as he aided our cousin. 

I am here. _Adsum_. He had told us that, frequently, in our younger days, when he had been encouraging us to try something new, in his role as the indulgent older sibling. I looked to Macalaurë, whose mien was tinged by memory. 

"Well, then. We have saved your horses," Russandol said once they finished, standing up, filthied and grinning in satisfaction at what they had accomplished. Findaráto grinned and turned to embrace him, flushed with victory. 

"Are they lame now?" Irissë asked sadly, going to her mare, staying well clear of her savior cousins drenched in muck. 

"Have faith, Irissë," Artanis said, laughing. "Russandol can be trusted to cure foot rot." 

"Whatever do you mean?" Russandol looked askance at our mirth. "Was I once a renowned healer of equine maladies?"

"Macalaurë may not have written you an ode," Artanis told him. "He did, however, compare loving you to foot rot. Contagious and incurable." Turkáno had doubled over in raucous laughter. Even my father was grinning.

"My dearest Kano, I warm your bed and you call me foot rot."

"Burn your clothes before you return to warm my bed."

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My father called for music and feasting that night, to celebrate the horses spared. I watched Artanis dance with Findaráto, laughing at whatever tale her brother was regaling her with. For her sake, I hoped he did not smell of horse. Macalaurë was waltzing without a care as he let his brother lead. The serenity on his face was matched by the languid, easy surrender of his form, entrusting himself to another in totality. He was in his customary black, his robes flaring in contrast against the ochre his brother wore. Russandol bowed to kiss him sweetly, equal of heart, and then switched their places seamless to offer him the lead. My sister came to me, demanding that I dance with her. When the music changed, I handed her over to Findaráto and pulled Artanis into my arms. 

"You will fuck me tonight," she ordered. 

That ended our dancing, as I tugged her to my chambers, and her charming protests convinced neither of us. 

She straddled me, hewn golden in the lamplight. She let me pray to her as best as I could, with her hands roving and claiming as they ran over my skin, with her teeth following her hands, with her gaze bright and flared, with her smile crooked and sincere, as she watched me scrabble desperately to last in the visceral warmth of her. 

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I cornered her before I could talk myself out of the audacious idea again. 

"What is it?"

"I need your help in woodworking."

"Woodworking?" She asked, quizzical. "Find Telpë. Better yet, find Fëanáro. You know I have no skill."

"I _cannot_ ask this of them," I muttered. "Come along." 

She let me drag her to the woods. I selected a bough that was sturdy and thick. She helped me smooth it of splinters. She helped me bevel it into a tapered cylinder. She watched me polish it with sand and pumice. There was no recognition in her eyes. 

"You were thrilled to be the first woman I had put my mouth on," I helped her along. 

She frowned at me. Naive creature. I bent to kiss her. 

"You can be the first to fuck me." I handed her the wood we had crafted. 

She raced me back home. She was still shocked, I saw, that I would make a suggestion so bold. Had she not done anything of the sort before?

"Twice married and you hadn't found your way between their legs?" I asked her, skeptical. She was a bold thing. 

"They were epitomes of masculinity," she said sharply, blushing at her inexperience. "I have neither experience nor knowledge of this. I fear I might hurt you."

"And here I heard that you were a quick learner," I teased, dragging her into my quarters. I wanted this, I realized. I wanted this from her. 

Her hands were warm on my back as she pushed me down to my elbows. I smiled when her lips came to the nape of my neck. She did that often. Once, after dinner, as we played games in Irissë's quarters, she had approached me to press a kiss to my nape, ignorant of where we had been. I did not wish to make her feel self-conscious, so I had not drawn her attention to it.

"Are you certain?" she asked, voice aquiver. She was nerve-strung but I smelled her want. I shifted from my elbows to my shoulders, and parted my legs wide, in lieu of reassuring her yet again that I was certain.

Her fingers danced down my spine, to the parting of my body, where they lingered warm and seeking. I wrapped about my right hand to guide her in, and she sucked in a stuttered breath at the tugging glide of my flesh about hers. It was invasive, but it was intimate. I was staining the bed. I closed my eyes as she began to explore, curious and greedy to know all of me. When I rubbed against the sheets for friction to ease the tightness coiled in my belly, she smacked my thigh in warning. 

"I haven't even stuffed you with the wooden phallus we spent hours shaping," she reminded me. 

My world yawed when she forced a third finger in. I wanted her hand in me one day, I thought wildly. Her thin and dainty hand that had once wielded scalpel and sword, as velvet that wrapped iron. 

"Findekáno?" She asked, bringing her free hand to wipe the sweat from my brow, from my back. I nodded, too unravelled to give her words. 

The wood, I had suspected, might feel unnatural inside me. It was not of flesh and blood and living pulse, after all. I had not accounted for the press of her bare skin against me as she leaned protective over my supplication, as she held me by the hip, as her fingers dug white into my buttock. I had not accounted for the dampness of her cunt against the back of my thighs and the sharp scent of her need. I had not accounted for her whispers of filth.

"You should see yourself," she was saying, unspooled, voice hoarse. "We should find a thicker bough the next time. You are clenching about the wood, craving." 

She dragged a finger along the rim of where she had thrust the object into me. I lost my balance at the drag of sensation that blazed. She fucked me then, with deep and uncoordinated thrusts of the wood she wielded. Her mouth was on my neck, claiming, as her body covered mine. I came untouched when she twisted her hand and sunk the wood deeper in me, pressing it against a conduit of pleasure that wiped clean my desperate holding on. 

She was conscientious later, unselfconsciously so, as she flitted about ensuring that I had not been harmed. Her care touched me. I dragged myself supine and tugged her to me. 

"Only a pleasant ache," I promised her. 

"I was your first," she said, dazed. 

"I thought that might please you," I told her, letting her kiss me many times, her lips scattering sweet all about my face. 

"Can we do this again?" She asked, shy, refusing to meet my gaze. The flush of conquest was bright on her cheeks.

"The next time, I want your fist," I said, yawning, tired and replete. 

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I laid aside my chivalry, and let Russandol dive for oysters all by himself. Instead, I lolled about the rock, as a snake warming itself after a night's long hunt. 

"What is it?" He demanded, perceptive ogre that he was. He flung his catch beside me. Seeing how loathe I was to stir myself, he dragged himself up on the rock beside me, splashing me in mischief. I made a rude gesture with my hand. He rolled his eyes and peeled open the oysters for me. 

"Feed me."

It was past any construct of my imagination, I thought wryly. This idyll of ours. 

"I wager even Ar-Pharazôn of Númenor had no nude slaves as lovely as you to feed him grapes." I waved at him. 

"The Kings of Elros's line kept their serving boys castrated, I read. It was so that they may preserve their sweet youth and voice," He noted. "I am certain they were lovelier." 

I glanced across at him, at how he sat there without self-consciousness, free in his skin, framed by the hyssops and the merry river. "I prefer my serving boy uncastrated. The grapes are more flavorful then."

His eyes sparkled in amusement at my silly words. "You dislike grapes. The oysters are best eaten fresh. They would lose their flavor if I waited to dress before I fed you."

"You have become a nudist."

He did not reply for a long moment. I turned to throw a bracing hand on his thigh. He could do whatever he pleased. He was alive. He could copulate with the stoats for all we cared. 

"It does not seem to matter now," he said finally, bringing an oyster to my mouth. "Perhaps I clung to modesty and reserve once merely because there were so many to wrest them away from me." I met his gaze and saw the silent question he could not bring himself to ask.

"It suits you," I offered. "Do as you please." I winked at him, grinning despite myself, touched by the dark humor of it all. "You cannot think that I mind the sight of you unclothed? If I had a jot of art in my blood, I would sketch you, every line and curve and hollow." I skimmed my fingers up the backs of his calves, and he collapsed in laughter at the sensation, ticklish there as he had been in the creation before. Disarmed by his laughter, I tugged him beside me, so that I may hold him close. 

The warm breeze lulled us into silence, and I watched him quietly, as he lay there on his stomach, propped up on his elbows, half his weight sprawled on my frame, shucking oysters to feed me, a creature of crimson tangles and well-formed flesh, unashamed to be seen under the sunless skies. 

"Are you well?" he asked then, too perceptive to be left idle. 

He harrumphed when I bit his fingers. 

"How can you dive? How can you ride? How can you bestir yourself from bed?" 

"Whatever do you mean?" He grabbed my chin and peered at me. The brackish water and swaying waterlilies were reflected in his gaze. I allowed myself a moment of appreciation for the stark loveliness of him on the moors. Lulled, I shifted my weight again to alleviate the dull, well-earned discomfort. 

"I see," he said, flushed, smiling. "I hope you enjoyed it."

"Shut up. It is a secret."

"As you say, cousin." 

"Now tell me how."

He threw his head back, caught in the throes of unrestrained mirth. I had ever loved making him laugh. I watched him fondly. He plopped his head down on my chest, nude and wet and smelling of salt and oysters and hyssops, his hair a monstrous beast's nest of its own I tried in vain to neaten with my fingers. 

"I enjoy it," he admitted. I knew that. Even in our tragic trysts born of darker needs, he had enjoyed that part of our relations. 

"Once you are broken in, you shan't notice it," he explained, sanctimonious, putting on airs, mimicking Turkáno. 

"Once I am broken in, is it?" I asked wryly, tickling him in the flank, relishing in his squirming and laughing. I hauled him into my arms and theatrically dropped him back into the water. 

"Oysters!" I demanded, as we laughed at our antics, fools under a sunless sky. 

He fetched me oysters.

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"You could ask my father to make a harness for her," he whispered at dinner. "He shan't remark on it."

"Tell him it is for Macalaurë," I demanded, shuddering at the thought of Fëanáro learning what I was up to these days. 

"I shan't. My father worries over my sexual peccadilloes as it were."

"You have turned incest into an art form. You have become an avowed nudist. I cannot fault him for his concern." 

"Measure her waist," he offered grudgingly. "I suppose I could make a harness for her." 

"What was it that you told me a few weeks ago about how you were allergic to leatherwork and the forge?" 

"I am told that I have ever surrendered my preferences for the benefit of the cause." 

He gifted me with the harness for her. He was no craftsman, but he had at least managed the function if not the form. I hugged him, grateful for his discretion, and pressed a kiss to his leather-chafed palms.

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Artanis giggled and blushed when I wrapped the harness about her. She dragged me to my desk and fucked me before the open window facing the courtyard. Outside, the maids hung washing on lines, trading gossip and chores. Outside, Tyelko was taking his convalescing stallion for a walk. Outside, the breeze ruffled the flowers and brought to us the heady scent of sage and lavender. I bit back my cries, but she was loud in her enthusiasm. My cock scraped against the fine ebony of the desk, and I lifted myself onto my toes to ease the sensation. The shift drove her in deeper, and every thrust found its mark against that place in me which left me breathless. 

"You are close!" She exclaimed. She had not ceased convulsing once she had begun, cresting wave after wave of pleasure voiced in low moans and eager thrusts. Her hand came to my cock and twisted, until she made me yield and spend over my desk, and she stayed a warm, lazy weight on my back. 

"Did you enjoy it?"

"However did you convince him to craft this?" She asked, laughing. "He is terrible at leatherworking. I shall ask our uncle for a proper harness." 

"Hmm, while you are at it, ask Fëanáro to shape for you a glass wrought phallus."

"Glass?" She asked, her breath catching as her imagination took over. I carefully turned myself about to hold her. The edge of the desk was unpleasant, but it had been worthwhile and a few moments of languor would do no harm.

"They were common in whorehouses. You can see the flesh through the glass." 

"How shall I endeavor to explain this to Fëanáro?"

I laughed at the embarrassment on her cheeks. She wanted it. She wanted to spread me open with glass and watch me. I tweaked her nose and surrendered with good grace when she kissed me softly. 

"You are Galadriel the Wise. I am certain you shall find the means."

The breeze carried to us the fragrance of white roses in bloom from the courtyard. Her face softened and there was no grief for ancient sorrow in her eyes.

_While we live, let us live_ , Russandol had been fond of saying. 

I kissed her once more, before scooping her into my arms and throwing her onto the bedding. She was protesting my brutish ways when I covered her body with mine. She relented when I pressed her quiet with my mouth. I took her so, with her legs wrapped about my waist, with her eyes wide as I breached her, her hands vices about my arms. 

Come then, I thought, your battle is over so put away your sword in its sheath, and let us two go up into my bed so that, lying together in love, we may then have faith and trust in each other. 

In the day's light, she saw me bared. I wondered why it did not sting.

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Ereinion chivvied me outdoors, to the river. Fëanáro was idle, so he accompanied us. We began to set snares for the rabbits. I espied Russandol swimming in the river, striving upstream, like the demented idiot that he was. He must mean to tire himself out. 

"Aspirational, are you not?" Fëanáro asked my son, squatting beside him to rework the snare he had set. 

Ereinion could not hunt anything more intelligent than partridges and riverfowl, despite the valiant attempts I had made to tutor him in hunting. He claimed that he was a better hunter on horseback. I doubted it. 

"Hunting mammals is difficult. They are fussy about their survival," Ereinion complained. 

"Your father, his sister, and his cousins hunted with their horses and hounds," Fëanáro told him. "On the plains of Valmar, through the ravines of Formenos, they would ride for weeks on end, living off the land, foraging and hunting. When they returned, with meat for the High King's table, with pelts for Queen Indis, children would throng the streets, excited to welcome them home with whoops and yells. They gifted me strange ores they chanced upon their travels. They gifted Telpë, when he had been a child, curiosities wrought of antlers and claws." 

Ereinion watched me in awe, seeing me anew through my uncle's tale. My uncle was no hunter of note, though he knew his way about traps and snares, as he had lived in the wilds when prospecting for ores with Nerdanel. However, both my uncle and Artanis were better than Ereinion. Perhaps the mammals of Middle Earth had been foolish things that walked into snares blind? 

Russandol swum downstream to spook away the lone, plump waterfowl that had been wandering into Ereinion's snare. 

"Stop that!" Ereinion complained, and went to dunk my silly cousin in the river a few times. I shook my head at their play and helped Fëanáro prepare noose and bait. 

"This son of mine has become a nudist," Fëanáro muttered, as he watched Russandol splash back to the shore, carefree and laughing. Ereinion was muscular and moved inefficiently, hampered by his clothes, and could not keep pace with my cousin's lithe grace in the water. 

"Who taught you to swim?" I asked my son, when he returned to us waterlogged. "Surely not Círdan!" 

"Telpë," he answered. 

Fëanáro raised his eyebrows in consternation. He had taught Telpë. I laughed. 

"I was considered an excellent swimmer, I shall have you know," Ereinion said, disgruntled.

"By the Sindarin folk, perhaps."

Ereinion scowled. "I did not grow up in times of peace, with seasons under the open skies with my brothers and cousins. I was taught neither music nor instrument, far less to hunt and fish and swim. I was killing orcs as a boy." 

His words ended my amusement. Fëanáro sighed and returned to fiddling with the snares, meticulous as he was when he chose to join the hunt. 

"I grew up in times of peace," my uncle said quietly. "However, my brothers and I did not traipse under the open skies for months every year. We had other matters we chose to pursue. Our children, every one of them, loved each other enough to set aside their crafts and pursuits and the politics of court in their youth to wander together. They followed each other across the Ice, across plain and vale and morass and ravine, into Angband, into the Void. They loved each other enough to unmake Ilúvatar's song." He smiled at Ereinion and patted his shoulder. 

My uncle spoke the truth of it, I realized. My siblings and cousins were, all of us, well-versed in hunting and riding and other physical leisures of the outdoors. Even Artanis and my brother, who had little fondness for the outdoors, were adept at these skills. Macalaurë, though he criticized our uncivilized ways often, had been ruthlessly effective in the wild when left to fend for himself. 

Russandol had left the waters, picking his way to us barefooted through grass and rock. Ereinion turned away, awkward despite the many times he had looked upon my cousin's form. My uncle sighed portentously and reached to drag curls of hair plastered to Russandol's face behind his ears. 

"Son of mine, dearest, clothes cannot harm you," Fëanáro chided him. "Ereinion is not used to your whimsies." Russandol winked at Ereinion, pressed a kiss to his father's cheek, and went to throw on his breeches and tunic.

"What do you often say about the times we must live in?" Fëanáro asked, watching Russandol tug on his boots and lace them up. 

"Fate deems the times we must live in. Destiny is how we choose to live in those times," Russandol offered, his gaze curious as he looked up at us from his boots. "What are you fretting about, Ereinion? Pray, refrain from listening to my father. None of us do." 

Ereinion did not reply, lost in his musings. Russandol glanced askance at me. I shook my head. 

Ereinion had been an orphan, despite what Russandol had done for him. He had known family only after he had worn the crown. He had been raised in Círdan's court, but he had been a curiosity there, a token of the mariner's generosity to my cousin. How lonely must he have been, to call out to the father who had spurned him, when he had been trapped in the Void? 

"Come now, let me teach you a trick I have never taught your father," Russandol offered, taking his arm. His perception, despite the oblivion of lethe, had never abandoned him. To my son's chagrin, neither had he lost the tendency to interfere in matters not in his immediate purview. "Have you ever cartwheeled on your horse?"

He had once entertained me when I had been a boy. I smiled as he led his feisty mare into circles about us, over rivulet and rock, and when the beast began to canter, he nimbly leapt atop her back, light on his feet and balanced on his toes. Ereinion shouted to cheer as my cousin took a deep breath, widening his stance ever so carefully, and pirouetted into a cartwheel, turning himself mid-air into a propel so that he landed safely on his mare, calves tight about her flanks. She snorted, entertained by her silly rider, and carried him back to us safe. These equestrian tricks and dressage he had learned from Mahtan, his mother's father, or so he had once hinted when I had pestered him for his secrets. 

"You had forgotten how to land," Fëanáro scolded him. 

"How did you know?" Russandol asked, surprised. How like him, to recklessly leap mid-air without quite knowing how to land safely. His pulse leapt in his throat, exhilarated by life's heady rush in his veins. Daredevil. 

"I have always watched you, despite your secret keeping," Fëanáro told him fondly. He had watched and watched, and stood helpless. Some nights, I woke panicking, dreaming of my uncle's weeping in the Void. 

I whistled for our horses. Ereinion refused to be taught the cartwheel, but he did learn to ride in the reverse under Russandol's patient tutelage, much to my envy. I had never mastered that. 

"There! I have cheered him up," Russandol told us, watching Ereinion ride off to flaunt his new skill to Irissë. "You are welcome." 

"Extol we must your many virtues," Fëanáro retorted, as cutting as Macalaurë when he was in the mood for trading barbs. I grinned at my uncle. 

"Try not to break your neck with stunts you have half-forgotten," I told my dearest cousin, as Fëanáro made his way to the stables. 

He smiled at me then, and reached to clasp my arm. "I was safe. I was with you. You have saved me from mightier follies." 

He had chosen to forgive me, he had chosen to mend what had been betwixt us, and he had finally chosen to trust me. I cupped his chin and kissed his brow, overwhelmed.

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I came to my quarters to find it cluttered by books and reams of scrolls and dried herbs. There were gowns and underthings stacked disordered on my chest of drawers.

I kept my quarters in order. Clutter drove me spare. I grinned, nevertheless, at what this portended. Without waiting for her return, I set about folding her chemises and gowns and stacking them neatly in the drawers, stashing bundles of dried herb within their folds. 

"You are back!" 

I let her come and kiss me, before returning to stuffing her books in neat rows in the bookcase I had stolen from my brother. 

"There was a rat in my rooms," she excused herself, shy, hesitant, and still bold enough to drag her things into my quarters without a word. 

"You know my tax."

"You charge a tax?"

"All Kings do. It is for the benefit for their citizens, you see." 

"What will you charge?" She curtseyed, laughing. "My cousin, my king." 

"There is an occupancy tax. You are to keep my bed warm."

"I accept," she said hastily, as if I might change my mind. 

"There is a storage tax for your possessions. You are to let me kiss you whenever I fancy it." 

"I accept," she agreed. 

"There is an upkeep tax. You shan't be allowed to leave until you have paid it."

"How must I pay this tax?" She asked, laughing. 

"You shall have to find out, Artanis," I told her, pulling her into a joy-drunken kiss. 

When I took the last parcel she had brought over in this unexpected invasion, I saw a beautiful glass-wrought phallus. My uncle was a craftsman. She took it from my hands.

"I wished to swear allegiance to my new liege lord," she explained, kneeling before me, bowing, and offering me the phallus as a knight might offer the king his sword in service. Theatre had always suited her. 

"We will be late for supper," I told her, stripping in haste, eyeing the distance to our bed. 

"I am sure that our uncle will peddle excuses." She stalked me to the bed, and stilled me when I made to turn over to stomach.

"I want to see your face when I watch you speared on glass."

"What I let you do to me!" I laughed, letting her splay my legs and settle in between. 

"You play a poor saint, my love." _My love._ I stared at her in awe, and wondered if she would speak the same words before others. "I was a woman faithfully obliging the men in my bed by spreading my legs in eager invite. You taught me the ways of arse-spreaders." 

"It was a glaring omission in your wisdom." 

"Thank you for remedying my education," she said, kissing me again and again.

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"We could make it to supper." 

I hummed. 

"I am hungry."

"Very well then. Get that thing out of me." 

"Can you wear it to supper?"

For the first time in my life, I was embarrassed by a sexual suggestion. Russandol and I had drunken of a perverse chalice for decades, but neither of us had blurred the line between the bedroom and the outside so. 

"Apologies," she said, blushing. "I didn't mean to offend you."

"What do you want me to wear?"

"Those dark blue robes, of lambswool," she demanded brightly, enthusiasm restored by my willingness. "May I braid your hair?"

"Dolling me up as your boy toy, are we?" 

She laughed and kissed me. "You can do that to me too, if you wish, when you wish. I have never felt so young and free, _liberated_ , before a man." She hesitated. "Do you feel emasculated when we do this?" 

I shrugged. She had picked up quaint notions from her time with her Sindarin huntsman warrior husband, I supposed. Perhaps the horse lord too had rigid notions of what must go on between lovers.

"Russandol cleared that up for the rest of us long ago, didn't he? What a man likes in his bed has no bearing on who he is elsewhere."

"He has become a nudist now," Artanis noted. "I hardly would hold him up as a commentator on sexuality." 

"He was ever a few centuries ahead of the rest of us. It will catch on, I am certain."

She smacked me with a pillow. 

"Mercy, mercy!" I laughed, and tugged her encased in my limbs so that she would stop her attack. "I am not emasculated, I assure you. You squirt when I fuck you. You squirt when you fuck me. I shall worry about my masculinity when I lose the ability to make you squirt. The worth of a man is in the orgasms he provides."

I got away from the pillow she brandished, and dressed for supper. 

"Do you mind that I occupied your quarters without your permission?" 

I had not expected that she would raise the matter. She tended to sneak about her wants in ways that offered me no chance to directly refuse. It was the first time she had boldly dared rejection. I walked back to her and knelt by the bed. 

We had spoken of other things. We had coursed about the subject most heavy on our hearts. We had wheeled about it, nearer and nearer, and drawn away when we had come close. This was the time and place, I decided. I would speak to her.

"Try not to hit me with that pillow again. I require solemnity," I teased her.

She scowled, and waited on tenterhooks. _Why linger, why turn back, why shrink, my heart?_ When I ran my fingers through her hair and cupped her cheek, she breathed out a long exhale of relief. 

"Findekáno," she said then, before I could speak a word. "I did not think I could, or that I would, but I do."

Hope was bright in her gaze, and her fingers trembled when she came to wipe off wetness from my cheeks. 

"Findekáno," she said once again, resolute, and my name on her tongue was love. 

I kissed her, and held her, and told her my truth. 

"Make your home in me."

Outside our window, children sung sweet madrigals as they played hopscotch in our courtyard, and the maids cut fresh roses of white for our family's supper table.

And my love made her home in my arms, as we wove for us a song of no god's make. 

* * *

**Author's Note:**

>   
> Sunset is maintained at a [Dreamwidth repository](https://the-song-of-sunset.dreamwidth.org). It is a set of stories that can be read as standalone or as a full alternate universe.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Godslayer, Fatebreaker, Revenant](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25177357) by [leglacie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/leglacie/pseuds/leglacie)




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